Wolf Boy

First, you have to imagine you're watching television really late at night. Maybe you just realized, after dozing off, that you've been watching a knife infomercial for the last hour and a half, so you switch the channel. A boy - around 5'7, gangly, hairy - is running through a field with a stick in his hand, darting out from behind tree trunks. The booming, authoritative narrator asks "is this a child or has he devolved into an animal?"

The boy / animal is me. My cable television acting career began and ended when I was still in school in D.C. At the time I was going to the George Washington University, which stretched a meager four blocks in the northwest corner of the district and cost 50,000 dollars a year. The least I could do for my mother was come back with a dream resume - the kind that wouldn't even need a shpritz of Versace cologne to convey its importance and sophistication. It would say, proudly, that I worked at National Geographic. Maybe I'd even bold that part, or use italics, or the graphic of a golden picture frame. No one would ever have to know I worked for the television branch, spending hours on three sentence emails and taping my boss's Frappacino receipts on pieces of paper to be copied in the copy machine.

One day, for some inexplicable reason, I was invited by my boss to sit in a board room with the head of the National Geographic Television Science department to talk shop about the next episode in a series called "Is it Real? The show was a pseudo-science program that explored "the gulf between fact and fiction." "Is it Real?" is a question asked to viewers of the show...a question that is answered in every episode with a resounding "no." Ancient astronauts? Not real. Psychic pets? Not real. Spontaneous human combustion? It's actually called sleeping while smoking. The show's promotional materials showed a dark figure stalking the woods, his frame blurred by a shaky camera. Was this man bigfoot or a boom mic operator? The point was not to ask too many questions, but rather succumb to the mania of conspiracy theories knowing they would all be debunked.

The name of the particular episode we were discussing, stressfully, was "feral children" and the topic of feral children is actually not funny so let us pause to not laugh and feel guilty. The idea of feral children is a myth we've created to distract ourselves from the fact that there are sometimes abused children who are abandoned in forests. They usually do not end up adopting the characteristics of gorillas, except in television shows like "Is it Real?"

So far, the producers had found two creepy parents on craigslist willing to let their newborn babies be filmed for the "pre-wolf" part of the show. But they'd been weirdly unable to find a child actor to play Victor; a French boy neglected by his parents and left in the woods. They'd found grainy, supposedly authentic, footage of Victor howling at the moon and breaking his parent's china, but they needed an actor to re-create the very real moments when Victor survives in the forest on his own by hunting for bears and deer using only a large stick and his manly, hairy hands.

"I'll do it," I blurted to my supervisor. Then I deleted my google appointment with anthropology class on Friday and practiced knocking my head against a wall and drooling on myself.

My obsession with embarrassing myself began in childhood. I began life staging humiliating musical spectacles for my mother. When I was ten, I would set up a stage lined with books in our upstairs, turn the lights on and off, fall off chairs of various heights, and perform a seizure on our oriental rug. My mother was confused, but usually pleased. "Yay!" she'd say at the end of every show "But what did it mean?" In elementary school, I was the one on the sidelines at the soccer game holding a make believe microphone and narrating the game to an invisible cameraman. From far away, I probably looked schizophrenic but up close I hope I at least sounded professional.

But after trying out for a few plays in college, I felt discouraged about my future acting career. I'd tried out for a part in a nouveau musical by Jason Robert Brown and was told by the casting director at my school that I was "too Jewish" and "too gay" as I hung my head and thought "well, Christ, that's all I got." I actually thought East Coast people would appreciate my faux-new-york-Jewish-mother accent in a male protagonist.

But I had deleted the bad auditions and painful childhood from my brain the very moment I had accepted the part of Victor of France, wolf-child. I was in D.C. and soon I was going to be on TV. Suck it, C-SPAN. See you in hell, 700 club. Hello late night cable stardom.

That Friday I arrived extra early at National Geographic wearing a Victor wig and a black t-shirt, because I thought it looked actorly. My producer squeeled. We packed into a van and left for the fields of West Virgina.

Up until this point, I'd always thought of D.C. as the boring, ugly J-Crew sweater-wearing brother to New York City and gave no thought to the hick land surrounding the city. But as soon as the van left National Geographic International Headquarters, I realized we were actually just a hop and a skip away from red-blooded heartland Americuh. General Stores, swamps and Lyme-disease abound. "What if someone sees me running and yells 'there's a gay!' and shoots me?" I asked my boss. "I dunno, try not to swish?" she said.

We stopped our van next to a generic field and my boss handed me a loincloth, a tub of Nesquik and a bottle of Dasani. I was instructed to go to the gas station bathroom and drench my loin-clothed body in clumpy cocoa powder. The image of blackface came immediately to my mind, but I immediately dismissed it. I took off my glasses, because wolf children don't wear glasses, and poured the fake-dirt-water all over my body.

The idea of running, glasses-less, through a forest was actually not that scary to me. I'm fine with looking out at the world and seeing a Seurat painting. In fact, when I first got contacts I was depressed at how ugly everything looked. But running doesn't make sense to me. I've never understood how to jog. Where does one find the motivation? It's not like someone is chasing you. It just looks silly, and think about it: you could die. What if your shoelace comes untied? What if you have a heart attack?

But, alas, I summoned the passion, the creative gods and yaweh and Drew Barrymore in Scream and the monsters in Where The Wild Things Are and this naked lady and I ran. And I ran and I ran...

Then came the fishing scene. I reached my hands into a stream and pretended to grab fish. "Gotcha, water! I'mma come and getchu, rocks!" The funny thing about method acting is that I absolutely have no fucking idea what I'm talking about.

Eventually, of course, the show ended up on cable. I gathered together my three college friends and the dude from down the hall and hyperventilated all over myself. My mom called me frantically five minutes before the show and asked, "would you say you're on for fifteen seconds or more like thirty seconds?" "Mom, I don't know, I didn't edit it." "Was it fun? Did you have fun?"

The show started. My face flashed on the screen for less than a milisecond. A gajilliosecound, maybe. "That could be anyone," the dude from down the hall said. "Yeah, but it's obviously me. Can't you tell?" "I guess. The dude is running awkwardly."

My mother called. "We're so proud of you." My five seconds of television exposure was treated with greater reverence than my last report card. Which was fine. I'd left acting to become an academic and what had it actually given me except a sense of my own intellectual inferiority? I was not riding above the commoners on a carpet composed of thesis papers. I was just a cog in a machine. Or a prisoner, being watched by Michel Foucault's panopticon. Or some other analogy that reveals my intellectual inferiority. In any case, it wasn't pretty.

But this was something tangible, something real that I had accomplished. I had run, I had hit my head against a tree, I had plunged my hands into a stream. Flies had followed my cocoa powdered loincloth. Maybe I even had lyme disease. I finally felt like a productive member of society.

"Thanks mom," I said just as someone in the background said "He runs kind of gay." I said goodbye to my mom and joined my starter friends gathered around the TV. They had already changed the channel to Jon Stewart.

On Euro Gays

Before I moved to Berlin permanently, I spent a winter there in 2008. The weather was the same as Seattle (rainy, hazy, full of bleak) but everything else around me was different. I was dating one of those mythical, sophisticated European gay men. His name was David, and he thought I was crazy.

David wore Capris and smelled like magic. He lived in a white modernist cube in a crumbling building above a major intersection in Mitte, near his Yogi friend "Greg". On weekends, he'd leave the apartment around midnight and come back at four or five am, at which point he would make bok choy with soy sauce and sleep until 2 in the afternoon. He was 35. I was 21 and terrified of life. We were an odd match.

David was completely over everything I was still under. He wasn't pretentious at all about his job (he was an editor at Reuters). He wasn't paranoid about sex. He was an "independent thinker." Talking to him was like being stripped naked. He'd make you see all your silly biases and petty fears for what they really were...it was both painful and exhilarating.

David took me everywhere. We'd go to abandoned warehouses filled with paper mache and dancing. We'd go to strobe-lit caves of wonder. I tried dancing like a German (there's less irony involved) and I definitely tried drinking like a German. I felt awe at this adult amusement park of art and leisure. On the drive back to his apartment, I'd stare out the rain-streaked window at all the grafitied and crumbling buildings, wondering what crazy, naked art projects were going on inside.

David was different than most of the gay men I'd met in America. He wasn't a bitch but he wasn't afraid of being a smartass. He was incredibly secure in himself. He had a confidence I feel so many young gay people in America lack. In short, I was mesmerized by him.

One night, David and I got into a fight. We were at a bar, talking to an old flame of his, and I began to feel like a used, snot-encrusted hankie. I suddenly believed he had slept with the entire city. "I've lived here a long time!" he responded. "So, of course I've known a lot of people." The necessary expiration date on this age-imbalanced relationship came into sharp focus. The next day, I wrote him an email apologizing for essentially calling him a slut, but it was clear we weren't cut out for each other at that stage in my life.

I left Berlin soon after; not because of David but because of money. But before that, I went to the aquarium. The aquarium in Berlin is in the middle of a big hotel. It's an odd place because it's a tourist trap in one of the least tourist-trappy places in Europe. At the end of the tour, you take a long elevator up through an enormous cylinder of water and fishies. They call it "the Aquadome." As the elevator rose, I watched as all the little goldfish swim around, casually humping each other, makin' babies, laying their eggs on make-believe coral. I thought of David. I'd been harsh. What he'd done was more of what being gay men begs us to do: sleep around. He'd followed his loves, and lusts, and I'd judged. "I'm such an American," I sighed to myself.

Back in Seattle, the gay bars were the same. The caste system based on looks prevailed. But I began to let go, just a little bit. I was more open to meeting new people. I didn't sleep around a lot, but I began to let go of some of my preconceptions. Berlin had relaxed me, and David had inspired me. His confidence brought a whole new meaning to the now antiquated and hollow term "gay pride." I truly felt proud of my sexuality when I was around him. Thinking back, one of the reasons I moved back to Berlin was because of how he changed the way I looked at the world. I wanted his life, and now -- in some ways -- I have it.

The Library at Southcenter Mall is a Cool Space That's Filled with Total Crap

ORANGE "CHICKEN"!

SINGING "ANIMALS"!

HELLZA GOOD BOOKS?

"Oh, the weather outside is frightful!" proclaims the tinny voice inside the ceiling speakers at the Southcenter Mall. "Lies!" I think to myself. It's actually not too cold outside (compared to yesterday). And I'm trying to read a fucking library book, so I'd appreciate less deceitful muzak.

Yes, I am reading a library book. At the Southcenter mall. And this isn't just any library book...it's "Guilty!" by Ann Coulter! The Witch's book! It was just sitting right there, and sometimes I like to hear the crap the other team is spewing (I inherited this off-putting curiosity from my father, whose idea of a good time is arguing out-loud with Laura Shlessinger).

Oh, there are other, less emotionally abusive books here, too. There are super-steamy black romance novels ("Drama 99FM," "Lies Lovers Tell") yawny Danielle Steele beach novels, Dr. Phil's simpleton screed on parenting and...is that a Pyncheon? The newest Chabon? What are these doing here?

The exasperating organization of reading materials at the Southcenter library sometimes lend the diminutive space a certain ragtag charm. Over in the news section, the folksy, afro-centric "Seattle Medium" shares space with heavyweights like the New York Times, Le Monde and the International Herald Tribune. Below are entertainment magazines from Vietnam and a major Phillipine Newspaper.

But, more often than not, the reading materials on hand at this baffling "mall library" are vapid American brain-drainers thrown together without rhyme or reason. A full wall is devoted mainly to romance novels with just a few serious books by Proulx and Lethem. The teen section is all Sweet Valley High and Nintendo magazines.

The diversity of the people of Southcenter has been discussed very eloquently by Charles Mudede who captured how the mall's mind-blowingly diverse patronage alters the way one sees Seattle. Mudede wrote, "your sense of who you are, of what Seattle means, is instantly obliterated by the cacophony of consumers who are seemingly from every part of the world."

But the diversity at Southcenter does not extend to the reading choices at the Southcenter library. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad there's a no-pressure, state-sponsored readerly respite for folks who need a break from seizure-inducing, corporate-sponsored mall spaces. I think it's great. I just wish they stocked a messier, more challenging collection of American literature, rather than mindlessly throwing together the scrawlings of some of America's simplest minds with a few adept American novelists and calling it a "library."

"The Bad Girl's Club" is a Misogynist Carnival of Human Misery

Tonight I watched the trashiest trash on television. The name of this trash? "The Bad Girl's Club." This show was made for the sole purpose of inspiring you to yell at your television. That's all it made me do. Yell. The premise? A bunch of "bad girls" live in a mansion in Beverly Hills, go out, scream at each other, cry, pull each other's hair, choke each other, jump on limos, yell about "empowerment,"("I feel so empowered right now!" screamed one girl while standing on top of a limousine in high heels), fight chicks, then go home, go to sleep, wake up, talk about last night, and fight some more. Then they go out again. Then they get alcohol poisoning. There are no eliminations, no tests, no feigned plot. Just screaming and fighting and drinking and crying.

Like Maury, the show has been edited for your condemnation. Portia, a black woman from Missouri, yells and gets naked when she's angry, for no apparent reason. Amber, a sour blond girl, offers terrible, horrible advice like, "you are here for you. And the more you help others, the more you hurt yourself."

The "reality" of the show is not a given, but it's argued to us on camera every five seconds. "I'm just keepin' it real," was probably spoken something like a 1,000 times. "You don't like what you hear?! I'm just keepin' it real." "I'm gonna be keepin' it real in here, don't worry." "I know I need to continue to keep it real." "I didn't come here to make friends, I came here to keep it real," "I'm just bein' real." "Don't hate me, I'm bein' real witchu."

All the girls on the show are willing to trade five seconds of fame for a thousand years of shame. The shaudenfreude works until you start to wonder what's wrong with your own hard-wiring. Unlike "Intervention," there is no offer of redemption through counseling; these girls were chosen for the sole purpose of making us feel better about ourselves, and they're not going to leave the mansion until one of them goes crazy and stabs the rest of them with chopsticks and they're all carried out on gurneys.

The Tyranny of Self-Help Books

I haven't read Barbara Ehrenrich's new missive "Bright-Sided" quite yet but her recent interview on Jon Stewart got me thinking about the disastrous implications of a nation bent on "positive thinking." It reminds me of conversations I've had with random strangers; conversations that somehow inevitably remind me that my thoughts are outside the realm of normal, productive thoughts. There's a subtlety to this way of talking to someone. And I don't even think that people are always aware that they're exerting an aggressive force on my thoughts. It can be as simple as telling me "well, maybe you might also want to think about your blessings," or when, after explaining to someone something that's just happened, getting the response, "oh, but don't you think that's good?" But how can something be "good" without making something else "bad"? I'm aware, at this point, that I most likely sound like a confused moral relativist obliquely trying to explain a general concept most folks on this earth find mildly annoying and nonetheless put up with, but I'm trying to get at the root of a problem so huge that it's actually making my writing life quite impossible.

I'm quite aware that the average blog is filled with the inevitable "writer's block" post where the author attempts to explain their lack of recent posts, or perhaps attempts to gloss it all over by saying something like "oh, I was just really busy," but I tend to believe (and you can shout at me about this later) that no writer is ever too busy to write, unless we're purposefully making ourselves busy (God, I sound like a self-help book already). And I'm convinced the reason I haven't been writing is because of some vague thought that some things out there are bad, and some things out there are good, and in order to write things that are good, you just have to be really, really aware of really huge creative missteps like being a huge cliche.

And while I agree with people who say that we think in cliches, and we act based on cliches and our lives are sometimes simply huge cliches ("You sound too much like an English major!" "You sound too gay!" "You're writing is just. so. JEWISH!") and that this is somehow HORRIBLY HORRIBLE BAD, I've been starting to think that cliches are frikkin' unavoidable, and it is simply total hooey to think otherwise. Cliches are ideas and thoughts that we sometimes have to expose and share (even in grandoise fashions) to get out of our systems. Writing in cliches might even be necessary. Much like there's no save-all self-help book that will tell us how to get rich through positive thinking, there's no imaginary guidebook to writing something great, and no soul who could say (without lying) that they know what art is best.

I am a huge cliche. You wanna know how? I'll tell you how. I'm a gay man and I'm Jewish and I'm middle class and so everything I create could somehow be labeled "gay Jewish middle class art" and that's somehow a cliche. I'm sure it is. I'm sure there is someone out there who could peg me. Maybe I'm even afraid of a moment like this (cue to :25). But it is really ridiculously silly to believe that there's some huge asshole out there who is ready and even has the energy to tell you you're a total cliche because of something you wrote. These people exist, sure. And I think the internet has made all of us far too aware of them. But they are not the ideal audience, not a typical audience and not the kind of people any of us should ever want in our heads.

I'm going to try to accomplish a big huge thing right now and say that one of the reasons online writing sucks is because I think we're writing to please those jerks. They're out there, sure. They're fucking everywhere. And they hate you for writing, hate your ideas, hate your tastes, and will gladly tell you how and why you're a huge cliche because of something you wrote on your blog. But you know what? Pandering to them is fucking ridiculous. When you pander to them, you end up with shitty copy you can't even defend. The race to call bullshit on things you're not even sure is bullshit, the race to come up with the most contrarian opinion, and the fear of ending up somewhere that's too earnest, too genuine, and too "divulgey" has made a lot of us total wimps.

I'm not saying everyone should be forcing themselves to reveal their innermost thoughts online if they're not comfortable with doing so. I'm not even sure if I'm saying that something like this is bad or good (here comes the tyranny of self-help books), but I think the race to label thoughts as cliche or not forces a lot of us into the shadows for fear that we're actually living someone else's life and parroting someone else's tastes. Things, in fact, are a lot more complicated than that.

Okay. I think I'm done yelling. I feel like I just wrote a manifesto for the vaguest art movement ever ("Write what you want to write and don't listen to the internet!") But you know what? If that's what you want to think, I'm not going to stop you. Perhaps the secret is to give up on your audience. So: fuck off. (I love you).

"It's Not in the P-I"

My friend Neal has a fantastic review of the newsy play up on his blog. Give it a read here.

Ephemeral Art at the Henry Gift Shop

Today I visited the Henry to see the last night of the installation "I know, I know" by Jenny Zwick and Joe Park. When I arrived, neither of them were around- but their life size cut outs were. Their faces and bodies were projected on to wooden silhouettes and anchored on a boat marooned in the left corner of the Henry gift shop. Below the boat, a strobe light and wind-blown metallic strips simulated a stormy sea.

Jenny and Joe hadn't worked together before this installation. Their names were drawn out of a hat by Gift Shop curator Matthew Offenbacher and then they were given two weeks to come up with a piece to entice gallery-goers.

According to Regina Hackett, the two vendors who ran the Henry's gift shop went belly-up, providing the imputes for Offenbacher's whimsical gift shop project. Offenbacher hopes the exhibitions at the shop will "fall like dominoes: a cascading cavalcade of adventurous, collaborative, celebratory artistic energy."

I dinked around the space, touching the artist's installation drawings on the wall and eating Offenbacher's delicious (and spicy) chocolate cookies.

Jenny and Joe arrived and began to unpack their ukeleles and banjos. "What a beautiful ukele!" exclaimed Betsy Brock, the Henry's communications director. "Did you know that they sell combination ukele-banjos in Seattle?" Jenny said, before unearthing a tiny wind blown piano (called a "melodica").

Jenny Zwick began to strum the banjo and Betsy began to sing. Since the piece was an open installation, any visitor could come in and sing along. Most of the folks who wandered in looked confused - but pleased.

After singing the same song for almost half an hour, Betsy brought out ukelele-versions of songs by Radiohead, the Magnetic Fields and Rihanna. They were a hit.

"I have an urge to drum something" Offenbacher said emphatically. Unable to find a tambourine, he settled for hitting the sides of the marooned boat.

By the time I left the installation, the weather had turned from dreary to dark- but my mind was still somewhere tropical and Hawaiian.

The next artists to be paired up at the Henry are Claire Cowie, Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata. Their installation launches November 20th. You should go.

"The Last American Virgin"

Last night I had the awful pleasure of watching one of the awfulest of all awful 80's movies with my friend Bettina. The movie was called "The Last American Virgin" (awful!) and you should think of it as the pervy godfather to American Pie, except even more gratuitously insulting towards women. I guess the film was supposed to make me feel wistful about my own adolescence but it just made me feel really shitty about the 1980's, which were obviously the Worst Time Ever to have a genuine human heart and a non-boner-related friendship with a girl.

The plot centered around three high school younguns on their quest to stick their boners in women. The boys hit on a Charo-esque older foreign woman, a bunch of young, giggly nymph classmates and a homeless prostitute. Throughout it all: crotch shots (so many!) and supremely creepy guy behavior.

Even though the film was pretending to be a fable about failed romance with chicks, it was actually a really long movie about "what not to do" to women. Like, "don't stop talking to a girl just because she's pregnant WITH YOUR CHILD!" and "don't 'do' an older lady just because you think it'll be 'funny.'"

As far as the directing goes, must we record every guffaw in emotional slo-mo? Can't we trust audiences enough to recognize a sad face? The 80's obviously didn't trust their child stars enough. This movie makes "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody" look like Sesame Street.

I hereby nominate "The Last American Virgin" for inclusion in this festival for terrible movies.

The Profundity of 'America's Next Top Model'

This blog proves that the secrets to the universe can be found in watching the most crack head moments of ANTM on repeat. Seriously, though, this is a scary universe. Imagine what it would be like to be surrounded by people who were whipping out the craziest, most expressive faces so that their televisual identities didn't end up on the cutting room floor. Imagine if your face = your career. Think about your face right now. Is it doing something a little bit unattractive? Do you maybe look constipated when you're concentrating on something? Do you have an inner life that makes your face occasionally inaccessible? Boom! CUT! I think I would end up crouched in a corner crying, which would then, in a cruel twist of fate, end up in the show.

U.S.E.! (or "All About the Time My Friend and I Crashed the World's Hippest Bar Mitzvah Party")

Last night I went to see U.S.E. at the Vera Project. I really, really liked U.S.E. when I was in high school, and I wanted to see if I'd still like 'em. Would their giddy back-up girls, roboman vocodor piano dude and general Bahamas crack house vibe still gel with me? Or would I feel as old and judgy as the crinkly curmudgeon grandpa in "Up"?

My friend and I started our evening at "The Sitting Room," which is a caramel cube of a space filled with warm theater folks drinking theatrically, and somewhere that's waayy off-limits to most Vera-goers. My friend and I talked about therapy, and careers, and friendship. It was a total "late twenties" kind of talk, and the Vera project felt like a weird place to go to afterward. I felt like I was about to crash someone else's Bar Mitzvah party.

Entering the Vera was like entering a secret club seized by hipster 'tweens. Together we pushed our way through the throngs of kids in the lobby (dressed like peacocks, sailors, robots and sticks of bacon) and entered Vera's main hall: a dark auditorium with large murals and booths to sit and eat. To our left: a trio of skinny Japanese 20-somethings wearing sequined shirts and signing posters. We'd missed the first act.

After a bit of time, U.S.E. flooded the stage with balloons and began dinking around with their equipment. The place was maybe an eighth full, but I didn't care about the lack of warm bodies. I was determined to be transported to some magical, tropical place.

It worked. I was transported, if only for a few minutes. The band played a series of songs from their new album (yawn) before finally giving in and whipping out the classics (yay!). I believe yes, it does suck to have to play the same song over and over again that you probably wrote one night, when you were 17, on a crazy acid trip, but, in the end, looking out at a sea of people shaking their butts and closing their eyes and twirling, because of something you're doing with your fingers and throats must make it all worthwhile.

Everyone was dancing, except for one overweight boy in front of us who looked perplexed by the whole affair. I wanted to grab him by his shoulders and yell at him. "I know you're having a bad time, but DON'T get into blogging, you hear?"

Near the end of the set, I grabbed my friend's hand and decided to be one of those annoying people who snakes their way to the front row. In no time at all, we were staring at a tapping, sequined shoe. It was awesome, and that was before the confetti strobe light storm.