I have another day before it's back to some terrible semblance of a workaday life for me.  I had a lovely break from all that these past couple of weeks, complete with a totally unexpected, perfectly gorgeous little romantic interlude of the kind I have not had since my days in Europe, which were steeped, it seems from the sepia haze of hindsight, in romance.  Turns out sometimes the difference between a really good blowjob and true romance is just Europe. Hmm.

On American soil what makes it romance and not just a blowjob is sometimes harder to define. But I suppose it's a little like art: you know it when you see it.

Speaking of.  I spent the morning helping Seven Hills Orphanage Artist in Residence, A.T., hang some paintings at Mister Crepe in Davis Square.  I have detailed here some fairly disastrous trips to Le Crepe over the past couple of years, but I have to say the service has improved.  One reason may be that they got rid of the kid behind the counter who thought everyone was hitting on him, even though he looked like he had just recovered from scurvy only to fall victim to plague.   I sympathize.  I mean, I know what it's like to go through life thinking everyone wants you.  But come on, there's delusion and then there's DELUSION.

Anyway, A.T. is the leading practitioner of the "Aquatic Ghetto" school, and his show at Le Crepe features some of its shiningest examples...  


This is A-Dawg's first show, and it seemed to me that he was inordinately concerned that one of his paintings would fall off the wall and crush a small child whose only crime was to be enjoying a crepe beneath it.  He was more liberal than I would have been with the fishing line while hanging the heavier pieces.  I told him not to worry about the children.  People have to suffer for art, and it's not always the artist.  And anyway, think of the headlines!  There's no such thing at this point as bad press.

The cafe was pretty sparsely peopled when we showed up mid morning to hang the pictures.  There were a couple of lesbians, a young Indian man with a female friend, a heavy-set guy who claimed to be a stand-up comedian, and a middle-aged Island woman with several bags, a turban and a scarf, in sunglasses, who's there sipping a small coffee every day from opening to about noon. 

Aside from his concern for children's safety, A.T. seemed unduly preoccupied about what the lesbians thought of his stuff.  I'm sure there was some typical straight guy fantasy playing out in his head.  "We really like your paintings!  Can we have sex with each other in front of you now?  You don't even have to pay us!" 

Unfortunately he felt like they didn't like his stuff sufficiently to merit a lesbian lap dance.  I shrugged.  I'm willfully ignorant for the most part of the inner lives of lesbians.  I don't know what they were thinking.  I asked him if he was really hot for this couple.  Stupid question to ask a straight guy, I guess.  He said he thought the girly one was cute, but the one who looked like a thirteen year old boy did not quite compute. 

Then he asked me which one I thought was the "top" and who was the "bottom."  I said I didn't consider it relevant or dignified to discuss it.  I sometimes wish lesbians felt the same way.  They always seem to be empowering themselves by appropriating male (and male-on-male) slang.  I remember reading a piece in Salon a while back where a female journalist kept referring to female masturbation as "jerking off."  And they're forever bumping the G in GLBT to the second slot.  Gotta have that L first.  And then they call themselves "gay" too, anyway.  Whatever.

I told A.T. "butch/femme" was probably more to the point.  I associate "top/bottom" with the practical logistics of love-making, not play-acting.  You may have to have an actual penis to appreciate this, but sometimes a "bottom" really is a bottom.  The butch/femme dichotomy seems to me to have more to do with social aspects of gender identity.  And "cross-dressing" seems more common for lesbians in day-to-day life than for gays (Even Ryan Landry doesn't go around in drag every day). 

The Indian seemed to be eavesdropping at this point.  He was watching us intently at one point, and I asked him what he thought of the pictures.  He seemed taken aback that I had broken down the "fourth wall" and addressed him directly.  And then he got sort of snide about it. 

"I wasn't actually looking at the pictures," he said. 

I was waiting for him to finish his thought with "I was looking at the two of you and wondering if you guys offer lapdances," but instead he said: "I was looking at the wall." 

Mee-yow.

"You're supposed to hang pictures at eye level," he offered, helpfully. "So people don't have to make any undue effort to look at them."

Another rave review. 

I was going to ask him if he'd strained his neck looking at us at ass-level for the last half hour, but I decided the fourth wall was probably a good thing for everyone involved at this point and promptly put it back up. 

As we were leaving a cute young punk with rubber o-rings in his earlobes approached A.T. and asked him if his pictures were for sale.  So that made up for the indifferent lesbians and the snotty Indian, I guess.

But why not decide for yourself?  A.T.'s work will be on display at Le Crepe for the month of January.  Check it out.  Everything's for sale, or, if you're a hot, horny, barely legal Latina and you just want to have sex with him, he's up for that, too, I think.

Speaking of hot, horny barely legals, I went to see The Wrestler last night with one.  Well, he's 24, but that's a full fifteen years younger than me, which shouldn't be legal.  When I think of myself at that age, I certainly would not want to have dinner, a movie, and a snog with me.  I mean that my present self would not be interested in my 24 year-old self at all, not that 24 year-old me wouldn't be totally infatuated with present me, of course. 

To my young friend's credit, he is not only gorgeous and a good conversationalist, but he's a bit beguiling to boot.  There is a mystery here that's worth coaxing out.  With kisses and caresses, of course.  It's the mystery of an inner life shining outward.  It's that rare thing-in-itselfness.  Occasionally I'll grasp a moment of presentness with him, the prism through which to view eternity. 

The intimation of that great and vast mystery — so vast, in fact, that we can't hold it once we've grasped it — is the province of romance and ritual.  And art, of course.  In the right context, acting can fill the bill as well.  As Stanislavsky said, acting is about creating a "believable truth." A believable moment of truth might be more to the point. 

Modern acting is a meditation on time with the goal of transcending it.  It is the practiced illusion of presentness.  To convince us that something that is happening for the hundredth or thousandth time is happening, always and forever, for the first time.  That it's happening now.  Not just that it's being reenacted at this moment, but that it's conjuring the moment itself. 

It's one of the peculiarities of our very peculiar species that we act at all.  Evolutionary Psychology encourages us to see all behavior as strategic in its origins, and acting is a useful strategy at the intersection of self and society.  Acting is deception, after all, and deception among primates starts as a strategy for not getting caught flouting social norms and often ends, at least in humans, in convincing others to join us in flouting them.  Great acting convinces us, quite literally, to abandon our senses.

You won't leave The Wrestler without thinking about acting.  Not only because of the well-deserved Best Oscar buzz around Mickey Rourke, but because acting is in large part what the movie is about. And while parts of it were unconvincing, Mickey Rourke's performance was not one of them.  It was fascinating to see that whatever it is that made him such a presence in his youth is still there, under the wreckage, and shines through the mask. 

As I watched, for some reason D.T. Suzuki's thoughts on Oscar Wilde's torments in Reading Gaol came to mind. 

To me Oscar Wilde seems always posing or striving for an effect; he may be a great artist, but there is something in him that turns me away from him. Yet he exclaims in his De Profundis: "During the last few months I have, after terrible difficulties and struggles, been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden in the heart of pain. Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint." You will observe here what sanctifying effects his prison life produced on his character. If he had had to go through a similar trial in the beginning of his career, he might have been able to produce far greater works than those we have of him at present.

Maybe if Rourke had had all that tragic plastic surgery earlier in his career we would have seen this poignant proof of a profound natural magnetism much earlier on.  As for The Man of Sorrows routine, all of the style of wrestling the movie depicts runs on the same logic: "When Heaven wants to perfect a great man it tries him in every possible way until he comes out triumphantly from all his painful experiences."  Which may include, but is not limited to: broken glass, staple guns, barbed wire, body slams and head-butts.

I don't want to take the Wilde thing too far, but some part of Rourke's very true and moving performance does seem at first glance to stem from the actor's off-screen antics. But I think Rourke is a natural  who's always had a singular presence — the surprise here is that while his body is broken, his talent is intact.  There's no question Director Darren Aronofsky  was attracted to what he was surely aware would be the parallels between aspects of Randy "The Ram" Robinson's story and Rourke's own, but I think that's more a shrewd marketing coup for the movie than anything else.

In fact, it's precisely when Aronofsky strains to make the obvious more obvious (which I'm beginning to see is his natural inclination) that the film falters.  Marissa Tomei's stripper with a heart of gold comparing The Ram's wrestling antics to The Passion of the Christ is probably the worst example. 

The two principals' feelings about their real names versus their pseudonyms is a slightly more subtle example, but the director hammers it home until you can't possibly miss the significance.  Tomei's Pam sees "Cassidy" (her alter ego) as a character she's forced to play out of sheer desperation, to make ends meet.  Rourke's Robin, on the other hand, sees his "pseudonym" as emblematic of the person he aspires to be.  That his boss at the supermarket (a gem of a performance by comedian Todd Barry) refuses to use his pseudonym is a constant reminder that he's not really who he wants to be.  Cassidy wishes she didn't need to perfom to make a living.  The Ram chooses performance over life.  Maybe — depending on how you read the ambiguous ending — literally. 

Truth is, if not for Rourke's performance the movie would implode under the weight of its cliches. Marissa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood are stuck playing two two-dimensional characters: the stripper with a heart of gold and the bitter abandoned adult child, respectively.  Of the two Tomei gets extra points for showing her tits half of her screen time.  Literally every line Wood utters is a screaming cliche.  At least flashing your tits distracts the audience from the sheer banality of it all.

I'm beginning to see that Aronofsky's emotional pallet is all primary colors.  That may be what drew him to this material.  Pulling off a serious WWF Passion of The Christ was no mean feat.  There is such a fine line between tragedy and farce, and almost everything you see in The Wrestler could easily have curdled into lowbrow comedy.  There's plenty of comedy here — don't get me wrong — but it is the dark, caustic comedy of life, not SNL-style gags or the reflexive irony of the postmodern crowd.  Rourke's portayal of Randy "The Ram" Robinson is not parody.  That Rourke achieves a "believable truth," that Randy is fully realized, and his humanity shines through, is what makes the movie worth watching.

In fact, it's these moments of truth in art and life that give us reason and courage to go on at all.  That they provide sustenance to our souls every bit as vital to our survival as food and drink can be seen by how highly we value those who can conjure them up.  And with Oscar season around the corner, I suspect we'll see Rourke on his way back up the pay scale to the rarefied realm of highly valued A-list Hollywood actors.