After much foot-dragging and being lazy about the whole thing, I finally have my very first professional headshots. For those non-actors among you, headshots are RIDICULOUSLY expensive, considering that actors tend to be dirt poor. Of course the photographers tend to be dirt poor, too, so I guess that's how they eat and bathe themselves. Fortunately, my photographer (who is a friend of mine from the camp I worked at over the summer) gave me a tremendous discount - he knocked his fee down to $350 from $500, a whopping 30%. In gratitude, I am including a link to his website. He is simply awesome.

Tom LeGoff: The Ballard Institute

Nonetheless, after spending $350 on the photos and getting back my retouches from him, I had to lay down another $389.61 to get a total of 300 headshots printed. (Reorders will be cheaper at 15% off) This means that if I hadn't been fortunate enough to know Tom beforehand, I could have been out almost $1,000 for 300 photos. Sheesh.

I am quite pleased with the photos, and so I am posting them here for all those people who said they want to see them when they're done.

Smiley.

Don't Fuck with Me. (To submit for stalker roles, murderers, and suchlike unsavory dramatic characters.)

Quintessentially me.

Of course, this last one is almost totally unusable for a headshot, and I didn't even bother to get it printed, but it's a great photo of me. Over the course of a 2 hour photo shoot yielding two or three hundred photos, there are many inevitable blinks, flinches, and other outtakes. Tom snapped this one just after he had said something pretty funny, and the result was a great candid photo. It may be my favorite photo of me ever.

The rest of today will include:
- Showering
- Watching TV on DVD with my friend Paul, with whom I had a "was-it-a-date?" a couple of weeks ago. It turned out that he was seeing someone, but we've been friends since then. We originally met through friendster, a fact of which I am properly ashamed and embarrassed. Heckling is therefore unnecessary.

Number of Best Picture Nominees seen so far: Three, leaving Munich and Good Night and Good Luck. It'll be a tough call between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Heath Ledger for Best Actor, but as long as someone wins for playing a big homo, I'm happy. My roommates and I are having an academy awards party for which I suggested the theme "The Academy Awards are SO Gay," but was rebuffed. Besides, isn't that the theme every year?

Speaking of Bareback Mountain, I must direct you to the best review of the movie I've read so far. I spent weeks trying to articulate why the other reviews left me feeling irritated and offended, only to discover that the New York Review of Books had read my mind in a review titled "An Affair to Remember," by Daniel Mendelsohn:
Why critical acclaim for Brokeback Mountain has been subtly but definitely homophobic.