Category: Journal

Synthetic

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Saturday

It took me a while to get rolling on Saturday. I went out for coffee with Luke Skywalker on Friday night, and I ended up having a lot to think about. I hadn’t realized the extent to which I’d been difficult to be around for at least a couple of months, and it seemed like time to do some reflection. I went home to have an “early night” but then stayed up until the morning hours reading and writing anyway.

The_Martian_2014

In the morning, I got through a big stretch of the novel The Martian, by Andy Weir. It’s been a while since I’ve plowed through a schlocky genre novel, and it felt relaxing to read something mindless. The way that Weir dramatizes technical and engineering problems, and weaves science vocabulary in with not too much condescension is actually pretty great. The big weakness in the book is how people dumb the writing is. The narrator constantly makes jokes without once being funny, and every single other character speaks in the same stilted, over-expository SciFi dialect. It reminded me of the scene that follows this clip from Party Down:

I had lunch with Ray Charles, who I hadn’t seen in a while. I had a good time talking to her, and we made plans to take care of the near-summer levels of beautiful weather we’ve been having to go sunbathe on the banks of the Columbia River.

I got my oil changed, which I’ve been stressing out about for a while. I didn’t need to be stressed, which made me feel stupid. I cursed the maintenance costs of Volvos, because synthetic oil is expensive.

In the evening, Luke invited me to her boyfriend’s place where he and his friends were doing a hot pot dinner. I didn’t realize until I arrived that it was going to be an elaborate lunar New Year’s celebration. I ended up having a lot of fun. It’s interesting to get a view into other people’s realities, and I enjoyed the break from being in my own head.

Sunday

Going to the river with Ray Charles and being in the sun and soaking up vitamin D and putting away my cell phone and not having any noise or being near any other people felt amazing. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about vipassana-style mindfulness, but as is typical with me, I fall into a trap of thinking that an abundance of reading will make up for practice. I drove back to the city feeling dozy and relaxed and still.

After coming home and eating, I felt an impetus to act, to do something, building. Over the last week, I had been listening to an audiobook of Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance, but found that the introspective substance of the book meant that I was constantly losing my place, wishing I could go back, and not getting the fullness of the material. I decided to head over to Powell’s to pick up a paper copy. The bookstore was deserted and perfect. I still felt like I was floating around from the afternoon, and I wandered through my favorite sections.

After buying the book, I headed back to the eastside to go to a coffee shop to read for a while. I’ve never been a do-work-at-a-coffe-shop guy, but I also didn’t want to be at the house. I decided to go to Southeast Grind for the first time, and was comfortable the second I walked in. Cheap coffee, lots of concentration, eclectic playlists, done.

I started to dig into Radical Acceptance. It had been recommended to me by my friend Kayak years and years ago, but at the time it was way beyond my personal tolerance for magpie, pluralistic spirituality. It felt like it might be the right time for it, though, because I realized that the internal narrative that I had been telling myself was that I was moving down a better path in recent months, and finally feeling like I was working up a head of steam. At the same time, in the past few days I was finally able to get out of my head and see that I had been acting like a real dick to the people around me. That suggested to me that maybe it was time to go another couple of rounds with my old enemy, perfectionism.

One of the most frustrating things about perfectionism is that it can completely hijack the growth process. I see myself in many of the anecdotes in Brach’s book, the patients and meditation students that try and use inner growth as another way to make themselves beyond imperfection.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot. I also think that perfectionism, for me, rises up more strongly when I feel like I’m about to lose something, or am about to go through a rejection experience or something. I’m not quite sure why I was carrying around so much tension and heaviness. It might be work, it might be extended illness in January. Every year I always forget that the weather just sucks too, so maybe it’s just seasonal. IDK.

Collideoscope

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Wednesday

I’ve had so many days recently that were hard because work was hard, that they’re boring to write about and boring to read about and I’ve come to think of them in my head as Schmuck Days. Wednesday was a Schmuck Day.

On Wednesday evening, however, I had a great experience. I was relaxing, and searching around for something to watch. Last Saturday, I had such a great time watching Frida, that it made me aware of how thirsty my spirit is for stories and myths about artists and how they exist in the world. I decided on a whim to watch The Artist is Present, the documentary about the MOMA retrospective exhibition of Marina Abramovic. From her website:

THE MOUNTING OF THE RETROSPECTIVE AND ITS THREE-MONTH EXHIBITION AT MOMA IS THE NARRATIVE SPINE OF MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, AND OVER THE COURSE OF THE FILM, WE RETURN AGAIN AND AGAIN TO THE MUSEUM. THERE, AS THE “SET” IS BUILT FOR THE NEW WORK THAT WILL BE THE CENTERPIECE OF SHOW, MARINA SKETCHES HER AMBITIOUS PLANS: ALL DAY, EVERY DAY, FROM EARLY MARCH UNTIL THE END OF MAY, 2010, SHE WILL SIT AT A TABLE IN THE MUSEUM’S ATRIUM, IN WHAT SHE DESCRIBES AS A “SQUARE OF LIGHT.” MEMBERS OF THE AUDIENCE WILL BE INVITED TO JOIN HER, ONE AT A TIME, AT THE OPPOSITE END OF THE TABLE. THERE WILL BE NO TALKING, NO TOUCHING, NO OVERT COMMUNICATION OF ANY KIND. HER OBJECTIVE IS TO ACHIEVE A LUMINOUS STATE OF BEING AND THEN TRANSMIT IT­­––TO ENGAGE IN WHAT SHE CALLS “AN ENERGY DIALOGUE” WITH THE AUDIENCE.

THE PIECE, APTLY ENTITLED THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, WILL BE THE LONGEST-DURATION SOLO WORK OF MARINA’S CAREER, AND BY FAR THE MOST PHYSICALLY AND EMOTIONALLY DEMANDING SHE HAS EVER ATTEMPTED. WHEN SHE CONCEIVED IT, SHE SAYS, SHE KNEW INSTANTLY THAT IT WAS THE RIGHT PIECE BECAUSE THE MERE THOUGHT OF IT “MADE ME NAUSEOUS.” THE WORK’S SIMPLICITY AND PURITY HAS THE POTENTIAL TO CRYSTALLIZE ALL THAT IS BEST ABOUT HER ART, BUT IT ALSO DEMANDS THAT MARINA RETURN TO HER ROOTS––AND FORGO THE OVERT THEATRICALITY THAT HAS CHARACTERIZED MANY OF HER RECENT PERFORMANCE PIECES. PERHAPS MORE THAN ANY PERFORMANCE SHE HAS DONE BEFORE, THE ARTIST IS PRESENT HAS THE POWER TO FULFILL MARINA’S OWN DICTUM ABOUT LONG-DURATIONAL WORK, IN WHICH, SHE SAYS, “PERFORMANCE BECOMES LIFE ITSELF.”

I had heard about the piece, and the film, when they came out in 2010/2012, but hadn’t gotten around to seeing them. I was so blown away by her spirit, her belief in herself, her joy for life, her complete melding of performance and life. Her work also explores themes like radical vulnerability, trust in others, inner stillness, and cultivating a life presence that intersects with other things that I’ve been exploring, like mindfulness meditation and the work of the western Buddhist writer Alan Watts. I felt myself really appreciative of Marina’s work because of my own practice that I’m trying to cultivate. I’ve become comfortable with the physical actions of sitting and contemplating, of shutting out external stimuli, however it is very difficult for me to shut down the background chatter of insecurity, self-criticism, and perfectionism. One of the many geniuses of her MOMA piece, or at least the facet that connected with me, was that she created physical conditions—sitting still and blank for 12 hours at a time for three months—in which one needed cultivate that inner blankness simply to survive. I found it very inspiring.

I used to make fun of performance art, as our culture does. My stereotype of it was Maureen in Rent, terrible, stupid performances that were cheap, pseudo-profound, annoying. One of the biggest changes that’s happened in my life so far is that when I was a young teenager, I was obsessed with the question “What is art?,” and had such strong (and wrongheaded) opinions about what was and wasn’t art. Hint: if it made me think too hard and made me feel weird, it probably wasn’t art. I remember a seed being planted that took many years to take root: a reprint in an art book I used to look at in high school of Nan Goldin’s Nan one month after being battered. The photo is like a snapshot, the photographer gazing into the camera with old bruises in the face and an eye still red from burst blood vessels. At the time, I remember being fascinated and repulsed by the ugliness of it. I could not understand why someone would display something so ugly, especially of their own body. I owe so much to that art room, the photo books there. What I’ve come to understand is that performance art uses as its canvas human experience and human emotional reactions. It is no more complicated than that. People often do not like having their reactions manipulated, and for that reason alone the form is always going to be controversial.

Back to The Artist is Present. I found a couple of biographical points very interesting. First is that the young Marina that let the public come up and cut her with scalpels in a piece if they chose, and rode in a van for five years begging for gasoline and money for groceries is clearly not the older performer that dresses in haute couture and has a team of security people that facilitate her performances. That difference is not commented upon. I don’t think she has to answer for them, but it did make me think that any of the voices represented in the film that rejected her work as just cheap provocation would not appreciate the evolution and negotiation of her work as she’s aged.

Second, she had a long relationship with a fellow performance artist, Ulay, and it was incredible to me that these two performers that practiced radical, violent vulnerability with each other still managed to break each other’s hearts.

This movie energized me after a Schmuck Day, and I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time.

Thursday

Thursday started off weird. I was going to start work late, so I had a lazy morning. The landlord was over to do some repairs to the downstairs bathroom, but our house looks like real people live in it so that wasn’t bad or weird. I got into a tense conversation with Luke Skywalker that came out of real feelings, but was mostly caused by my sunday night attack of lonelybrain that I’m still trying to beat back.

I was in charge of taking care of four kids all day that were taking part in a performance for a big annual fundraiser at work. The kids were fine, the performance was real rough, and overall it was a long day.

Friday

Today was a work day, where we were closed for after-school programs, but all working in the building. We spent all day sorting through and reorganizing our storage and supplies, which we’ve needed to do for a long time. We got so much done, and our hoarder boss was pretty chill about it, for the most part, and only got micromanagey about keeping garbage at the end of the day when most of the stuff was gone or away.

Quiet evening at home felt like the right call tonight.

Bard

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Friday

Friday was not so bad (that’s the frame of mind that I’m in right now—not so bad). I got paid, so I started to send money out to pay bills. Paying bills is almost a nice feeling right now, because at least it feels like control.
Work was fine. Our CEO came to observe one of my sessions, which was fine—I don’t mind that kind of observation—but it meant that I lost a day to prepare for an event that’s happening later this week.
I got off work and came home to change and shake it off. I asked one of my friends to let me into a Reed practice room because I hadn’t made any evening plans, and I’ve been dying to play on a real piano for months. I had a little downtime, so I had an excellent quick meal at Laughing Planet. I don’t like their cultural whitewashing of burritos, but I appreciate that they serve real food, and I enjoyed it very much.
Sitting in a practice room and playing for myself is one of those through line experiences for me. That was middle school, high school, college. I wasn’t able to stay there as long as I was hoping, or get much “work” done, but it was just nice to play and sing and listen and take pleasure in my own art. It was also a nice reality check, because the action on the piano sucked, and it reminded me that just because some pianos look like real pianos does not always mean they’re better than what I’m practicing on.
After that, I came home and drank a bunch and binged Attack on Titan. For whatever reason, I got very into it and some of the shonen tropes—tragic back stories, commentary on strength and weakness, feelings of powerlessness—hit harder than they deserved to. Superego Brain was objecting to the unchecked sexism and fascism, but for once I didn’t let that distract me from having a primary experience with the work. After that, I slept like the dead.

Saturday/Sunday/Monday/Tuesday

I got caught in a vortex of feeling bad, and now that I’ve come out of the other side of it, I don’t have much of an appetite for revisiting it. Next time.

Stuck

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

Lots of workingman’s weekdays. Work has been a little harder because of staffing levels, so fewer hands to do the same work. I’ve been getting home and passing out early. Started watching Attack on Titan last night, I’m really liking it so far.

Teeth

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Ate cereal, drove to work. When I got in, I found out that nobody had picked up the van I needed for later in the day, which was fine because I was bingeing on Invisibilia. I have mixed feelings about the show. It’s well reported and crafted, but I can’t stand the Radiolab-inspired, “we’re just two brainy gals putting on a show because, gosh darn it, we just have so many questions” tone to the show.

The rest of the morning passed. I paid bills and sent out emails about things I’m working on. Basically attended to accounts.

In the afternoon, I got a group of kids together to get their teeth looked at and assessed for a day of free dental work that’s coming up. The weather was pretty bad, and the vans that we use can be…difficult in good conditions, so I wasn’t thrilled about being on the road. It’s been really windy and wet, and the Glenn Jackson bridge between Oregon and Washington was particularly scary. We got to the club that was hosting the dental day, and they were pretty shorthanded too so the whole thing was a little crazy. The kids were pretty good, though. That being said, it was still pretty noisy and pretty crazy, so I started having a baby migraine level headache that just kept building as the afternoon turned to evening. By the time all the kids were picked up by their parents and I left to drop off the van and pick up my own car, my head was splitting.

I took the opportunity to stop by a Trader Joes (I’m very sad that there’s not one closer to my house) and got myself a bottle of wine and some food. Once I got some food, some water, and some blissful silence, I felt a lot better, even though my head still hurt a lot. I tried to get some preparation done for my Shakespeare thing next week: I read a few pages of As You Like It and watched a few minutes of one of those painful 70’s BBC adaptations that feature great actors, great acting, and miserable everything else. I was finding it really hard to focus on, well, anything, so I decided to say fuck this day and went to sleep at like 10:30.