Hi, Alantown. Long time no see!
Last spring I wrote and abandoned three alantown posts (one about Miranda July, another about Injury Reserve/By Storm, the third about the NBA Playoffs), followed by a long hibernation. But now I am back.
It felt right to return. I’m about to enter the most public-facing era of my life (more on that later), and I’ve been reading the email newsletters of so many of my beloved that it gave me the itch to come back like [insert your favorite emo band that had little contemporary success and years later blew up on internet forums and subsequently reunited—american football, panchinko, the brave little abacus one day (one day, right???)]. I digress.
So much has changed since I last saw you. I moved to Bushwick and started barista-ing at Joe’s workplace. I went to strange little raves alone, sometimes even sober, and danced hard and long into dawn and felt completely anonymous and sparkling with hot sweat. I made new friends and saw old friends so much more than before. I stopped being a boy.
That might come as a shock to you, or maybe you’ve already known for years and you’ve been waiting for me to catch up. My previous Alantown post was, in its subconscious undercurrent, written about confronting or not confronting the growing dysphoria I was feeling at the time. Well now here I am.
It’s been a year of ‘here I am.’ For the better part of it, I’ve been developing a short film called “Running Lines” that will be the first thing I’ve written and directed since “Table on the Beach.” In the coming month I’ll launch a crowdfunding campaign that will try to raise almost a hundred times the budget of “Table on the Beach,” which is thrilling and terrifying.
I’ve probably described the film to you already and if I haven’t, you’ll definitely hear more soon, so for now I’ll just say that it’s about transness and Chineseness and Shakespeare and motherhood and it’s the most compelled I’ve ever felt to tell a story.
For a long time in writing for the screen I struggled between the poles of writing something that felt too autofictional and solipsistic and something that felt too detached from myself and more a practice of craft than something I had a significant compulsion to realize. I think “Running Lines” has significant resonances outside of myself and it also truly comes out of the fabric of my life. I’m so lucky to have found it and to have the chance to try and make it.
Now we’ve arrived at the ‘more on that later.’ In anticipation of the fundraising for the film, I’m preparing to significantly broadcast myself on social media for the first time ever. It’s a doubly psychically crazy prospect because I will also be broadcasting this baby-bird-brand-new conception of myself that has barely learned to fly, for all my aunties, cousins, estranged friends, ex-flings to see. But it’ll probably be fun, too. Whatever.
You, as a card-carrying resident of Alantown, now have this premonition for all the alanposting that is to come. I miss you all, even if I’ve been bad at returning calls, even if I saw you yesterday.
If you came here for music recs, listen to Asher’s cover of Casper by Jessica Pratt and dancing parakeets by OHYUNG.
Alantownhall meeting adjourned.
