I was supporting myself, but nothing like the guy painters, as I refer to them. I always resented that actually.. we were all getting the same amount of press, but they were going gangbusters with sales.
The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.
From getting good grades in school, to thinking about getting a good career and settling down, we all have been running a rat race. We always thought that we were doing it for ourselves but actually we were doing it for others. Like, I realized, I never had time for myself.
If you were a U.S. Cavalry guy and you thought you were going to be captured by the Apaches, you might kill yourself. If they were with their wives and they thought they were going to be captured, they would shoot their wives for fear of the Apaches getting them.
Well, it was actually - I brought the idea of doing a documentary to HBO back in 2000, when there were some press reports sort of were bandied about that there were going to TV movies based on some of the books that were out.
My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know.
Nothing spooky or terrible happened on set, but we were told to say it had. We were giving a press conference and the writers were going on about these terrible things that supposedly happened while we were filming.
I was playing the villain 'Falseface' on Batman, and I got wind that they were going to pay a young starlet $25,000 to be in the same episode. Well, I wasn't getting anywhere near that amount of money, so I refused to let them put my name in the credits.
There was nothing worse you could be than a tweener. There was nothing worse you could be, and there were so many good guys that were so good that were tweeners, and they couldn't make it... And when you got that label, it was going to stick. It's like getting branded.
I'm sure a lot of you had this experience when you're changing. You're growing as a person and people tend to treat you like you were 18 months ago, and it's really frustrating sometimes when you're growing up and you're more capable. It's the same thing with a company and the press. The press is going to have a lag time. The best thing we can do about the press is embrace them and do the best thing we can to educate them about our strategy. But to keep our eye on the prize, that is turning out some great products. the press and the stock prize will take care of themselves.
I have some friends who love to perform and wish they were getting the attention I am getting. But that doesn't stop them from supporting me.
There have been times in my adolescence where I gave up. I was like, 'I'm just never going to be pretty. I'm never going to be like one of those people on the front of magazines.' It always seemed really strange to me that the projection of how people are in advertisements looked nothing like the people who were actually buying them. You know what I mean? I never understood that mismatch, and now I really start to see that the people you see in the media are a lot more like people actually are.
My idea of what was going on in politics was driven by activism. I came out when I was 17, and right away I started working in the AIDS activist movement. For me, politics was about getting drugs approved and getting prisoners access to the same kind of drugs that you could get on the outside. It was about getting needle exchanges approved. That was politics. These were policy problems that were killing people, and we were trying to get them changed.
I actually ended up going through a vocal change. It started about two years ago, and it's only been recently that I found my balance again. Vocally, I couldn't figure out what was going on. My lows were getting lower, and my highs were getting higher; everything felt weird.
Those of us who actually were working in the region at the time will point out how strongly committed we were to supporting the democratic process and encouraging elections, in spite of the fact that a war was going on in several of these countries.
Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.
When I lived in Chicago, it often felt like the same people who were going to all the little theater companies were the people who were working in them.