Ben Natan

@thebennatan

Stages and pages.

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Ben Natan@thebennatan· 17d

350 pound rows lmao

Ben Natan@thebennatan· 18d

Ben Natan@thebennatan· 21d

:’)

Ben Natan@thebennatan· 22d

Taming has gotten some great reviews so I made cute little pics. 8 shows left.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· 22d

No belt. No straps. Squat bar. 455? No problem.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· 24d

Phils win

Ben Natan@thebennatan· 25d

They decided to surprise me by flying to New York and came to this huge party I was throwing. I was shook. I hadn’t seen them since I was 22.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· 25d

In honor of today being 15 years since my partner and I met… here is the two of us at senior prom.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· 26d

I love the Gorillaz but unfortunately I cannot hear any of their songs without thinking about Flimsy Steve.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· 29d

Come see the play :)

Ben Natan@thebennatan· 29d

beautiful downtown Manhattan full of smoke and sweat today

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jul 13

I opened TAMING OF THE SHREW this weekend to a sold out crowd. End of a long, exhausting, rewarding road. And I know this boy missed me.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jul 12

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jul 7

Actually he’s a tuxedo cat named Cassian

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jul 6

This was one of the more heinous things about Platner when it was written and it’s aged like raw milk in the New York City Sun.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jul 5

Unbelievable work here from @nicsanchez.bsky.social

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jul 3

This fall!

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 24

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 23

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 22

They need heavier dumbbells at my gym

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 21

And I just got out of Leviticus, which I was incredibly moved by.

TheRedBen
Leviticus 2026
PRO
LEVITICUS
Watched Jun 21, 2026
To want something is to risk not having it. To have it is to risk losing it. To desire it is to risk coveting it.
Desire then is a cage we put ourselves in. There are a million different outcomes when we yearn for something, or someone. And most of them are bad. Yet we do it anyway.
Boyhood is hard. It's not exceptionally or especially hard, but it is uniquely hard. Because 10 years into having consciousness you start changing: Your body changes while your brain is all of a sudden desiring things you never knew you wanted. No one around wants to give clear o explanation or guidance without judgement, so boys are left to just wonder what's happening.
And you end up in this "kiss or kill" range with life.
Or at least that's what it felt like for me.

So what happens when boys want to love. Or when they lose it? It's the cage again. It's punishment by the world around us or the punishment we dole out to ourselves. Mourning lost love becomes indulgent. You bottle the feeling of heartbreak because it's a memory of the person. You hurt yourself over and over again because it's the only thing left to do with that memory. You can't be alone because they enter your head and are no longer capable of doing anything good in there.
But we do it anyway. Because sometimes it's good. Heartbreak is always preempted by love. By mutual desire. Maybe you know it's doomed from the beginning and you do it anyway because it feels better than anything. Maybe the danger adds to it. Because we overcome it to get what we want. Because we defy odds.
Desire is a minefield. Especially when you're young and don't have the tools to walk around it.
And that's before all the shit the world hangs on our necks: the judgment and the bigotry and the guilt...

But if we're brave enough and we can acknowledge how dangerous this all is for ourselves, we can do it anyway. Because in the end, what else would god put us on this earth for if not to be with one another.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 21

This was about disclosure day, which I loved

TheRed Ben
PRO
Disclosure Day 2026
DISCLOSURE BAY
Watched Jun 12, 2026
From 1939-1945, the worst human crimes imaginable came at the exact moment that humanity was able to almost instantly know about them.
Televisions catapulted images across the world within days or sometimes of hours. And images of what? Of Normandy. And Dresden. And Auschwitz. And Nanking. And Hiroshima. At the same time that humanity wiped out 45 million+ people in a few years, we knew everything about it. And no one could do anything to limit the dam breaking and consciousness spreading globally.
Over time, as the government got a better handle on these technologies, the flow of information went from a flood to a trickle. And those some kernels of information (mixed metaphors!) still had an undeniable impact on our collective understanding of the world: The Anti Vietnam War movements and The Civil Rights Movements were greatly enhanced by their ability to be globally visible.

There's a certain generation of Americans, which my grandfather is a part of along with Steven Spielberg that is intensely aware of the catastrophe of World War 2 and the fact that the US government has been trying to obscure themselves and the world around us ever since.
The Roswell Incident happened in 1947. My grandpa was 8. Spielberg had just turned one.
And it's all they can really talk about. Disclosure Day is Spielberg's 4th movie about Aliens. For a man who has spanned genres across decades, he always comes back to the extra terrestrial.
But this movie wasn't really about aliens in the way that War of the Worlds or Close Encounters or ET were. There was little tension or holding about "the truth." Because Spielberg believes we all agree on the same truth.
The horror is actually in the fact that we have spent decades trying to get through every day knowing we are being lied to. We know the depths of human depravity, and when confronted with it, typically humans recoil and are then moved to do something. But that impulse to action has faded the more we're being lied to and the more we are crushed by the demands of daily living.

The movie feels like a final plea by a man who has been tortured by knowing for a lifetime. There is no subtlety. And the message is weighed down by Spielberg's own internal conflict that maybe knowing could be worse.
That maybe society requires this sort of top level secrecy to function, and that's scarier than anything that could visit us from another world.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 21

I wrote this about Backrooms last week.

TheRedBen
PRO
Backrooms 2026
Watched Jun 6, 2026
Whenever I talk about grief, I try to describe a ball bouncing around in a box. And that box has a button in it. And if the ball hits that button, you remember.
And as time passes the box gets bigger. The ball has to travel further. You put other stuff in that box. Life fills it up. Maybe you add some new buttons. But it gets bigger. The ball is obstructed but it keeps bouncing. Maybe it moves slower but it still moves. The button gets pressed less and less.
After a long time you don't think about the button as much. Forget what it feels like to remember.
The inciting event distorts, fades into the mist of the box as it gets bigger and heavier to accommodate your life.
Details change: What people's faces looked like when they hurt you. What the last thing someone said to you before you lost them.

We drop words. Change the tone of their voice.
Lose bits and pieces of the story we tell ourselves.
But the button is still there. It'll probably always be there. All we can do is let the box get bigger.
And hope the button continues to disappear into a sort of obscurity.
But one day, later and later on, the ball can still hit the button. And it can kill you.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 21

Advising me on exactly the right cigar to pick out to smoke at graduation.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 21

Happy Father’s Day to the og Natan. Here a a few extremely dad-coded things he’s done over the years that I have loved and that helped shape me.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 19

omg they did this

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 19

190 hitting 225 on incline for reps is soooooo sick

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 19

Paddy Considine in House of the Dragon

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 19

Doing indie theater is so much fun because you do these scrappy little promo shoots and everyone assumes you’re getting married or doing A Streetcar Named Desire.

Ben Natan@thebennatan· Jun 18