Category: Journal

the three part test

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I am not a lawyer, but there was a time when I wanted to be one, or admired them or something. It might have been the John Grisham thrillers, which are written for (as well as many other groups of people) 13 year old boys and men who think they totally could have been a lawyer. If it wasn’t them, it was probably The West Wing, which is written for 16 year old boys and men who think they totally could have been president.

If I’m really telling the truth, I have to confess that lawyers were the closest thing I could find in real life to the magic wielding characters I loved in fantasy stories. Like wizards, lawyers come in (lawful) good, evil, neutral alignments, memorize incantations in Latin, and the old ones get to wear robes. Is a trial a metaphor for combat, or is combat a metaphor for a trial?

One of the things I like most from legal culture is the idea of the legal test. From the Wikipedia:

Legal tests are often formulated from the logical analysis of a judicial decision or a court order where it appears that a finder of fact or the court made a particular decision after contemplating a well-defined set of circumstances. It is assumed that evaluating any given set of circumstances under a legal test will lead to an unambiguous and repeatable result.

Legal tests, Wikipedia

I love a well-constructed test. At their best, they are a way to cut through all of the distractions, all the stray bits of context that we think are important, in order to get to the really meaningful questions. I’ve been developing a test for myself to help me evaluate my media choices. I call it “Matt’s Three-Part Test for Deciding Whether To Hit Play Next Episode or Get The Fuck Out Now.” Here are the three questions:

  1. How does this make me feel?
  2. How active do I have to be to engage with it?
  3. How does this change my behavior?

Let’s look at a couple of test cases:

  • An episode of Fresh Air about the Muller investigation makes me feel anxious and bad, I listen to it passively, and after I finish the episode it makes me so angry that I go out and send bad and boring tweets, like Donald Trump himself is reading my Twitter feed and he just hadn’t heard from me before deciding to resign.
  • The new season of Queer Eye makes me feel human and connected, when I watch it it makes me think deeply about my own life, and after I finish watching it it gives me motivation to connect with people I love.
  • Reading a genre book from a genre that pushes my buttons—maybe a steamy gay romance or a sci-fi novel or a mystery—makes me feel entertained and relaxed. It might be empty entertainment, but afterwards I feel rested and refreshed.

The wild thing is that sometimes we do choose to read/watch/listen to the thing that makes us feel bad, that doesn’t stimulate us, and that makes us act shitty afterwards. Some social media communities are nothing but toxic circle jerks of feel-bad propaganda, and that includes groups that I feel a closeness to and groups that I feel un-included from. There are times when I feel like using the test—insulating myself from information that makes me feel bad—feels like a real first-world luxury. It seems cruel to decide I don’t want to engage with something upsetting when it’s related to an issue that could use attention. When I’m on the fence, I add this additional question:

  • Right now, does the media I am accessing make me feel empowered to attend to the problems that exist in the spheres where I have influence, or does it make me feel disempowered like my choices don’t matter any nothing can ever get better?

That usually tells me whether I should take on the one more upsetting thing, or whether I should take care of myself so that I can win the battles I am actually in.

How do you decide what to let into your brain?

nouvelle vague(book)

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

This one’s for you, Miche.

There’s a moment that I love while performing. It might be before an entrance, or maybe behind a curtain that’s about to lift. Or right before launching into a solo. There’s a moment when I know what is going to happen in the immediate future, something that nobody else in the room knows. I’m holding that future in my mind, getting into the position that I need to be in to begin, collecting my breath and my body. In the space of as little as 10 or 20 seconds I run through the next sequence. My heart is humming with adrenaline, so I know that my timing is going a little fast. I take one extra moment to find a little bit of calm.

And then I leap.

That’s what right now feels like. I once heard an episode of Andy J. Pizza’s Creative Pep Talk podcast about how one’s relationship to a creative body of work has seasons. Some times, the land lies fallow. Other times, there are ideas ready to harvest. And other times, there are seeds going into the ground, germinating, and growing. It’s something I like to keep an eye on, asking myself from time to time, “Does this feel like a harvest time? Does this feel like a time for planting?”

Right now feels like a growing time. This year, as I’ve written about before, I am trying so hard to escape the tides of feed-based social media and recommendation engines. That’s a seed that’s growing. I’m reading more. That’s another seed. Something that I hope to write about more in due time is the work that I’m doing to really take a hard look at sex and sexuality, which is something that I was inspired by this new/ish crop of shows like Big Mouth, Sabrina, Steven Universe, Pen15, and Sex Education to talk about with my therapist and which has opened up so many different questions for me. Many days I am incredibly optimistic about the heavy things in my heart that I am starting to believe that I can set down. I’m also often emotional, tending to and reassuring the tender inner child who has learned to put his needs last.

One of the most difficult questions I deal with on a daily basis is how to answer the question, “How are you?” I can think of so many over-honest ways to answer that question.

I am frustrated because I need to tend to myself, but instead I am here.

I can’t possibly answer how I am because I’m barely able to answer when I am or where I am. DEFINITELY not why I am.

Please don’t ask me that. Even better, please don’t look at me or talk to me.

I have never identified so much with the teenager-y desire to be invisible (this is an exaggeration, please don’t fact check me). To bring it back up to the point of where I started, in order to get to the point where I am ready to take that breath and take the leap involves a lot of preparation, a lot of contemplating choices, and a confidence that this is the choice. I don’t have that yet, but I’m getting there. And more than anyone else, I’m so ready to discover what comes out.

loops

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
Chow Chun Fai –– “Last Supper“, Renaissance Trilogy I (2005)

This story tickled me:


Hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens have gone to work in Africa, where they have encountered foreign cultures that leave many of them feeling alienated. For some of these disaffected Chinese workers, a source of comfort has come from religion, most notably the Evangelical Christianity that pervades much of sub-Saharan Africa. Evangelicalism prioritises conversion of non-believers, and the Chinese, heavily discouraged from practicing religion at home, are attractive potential converts.


Many local African churches have reached out to Chinese workers, including incorporating Mandarin into services.  A number of Chinese, in turn, have welcomed the sense of community and belonging that these Christian churches offer. And a small but growing number of ethnically Chinese missionaries from Taiwan and other countries are specifically targeting Chinese nationals in Africa, preaching to them with a freedom they’d never be allowed in the People’s Republic.


Many of these Chinese workers are returning home, and they’re bringing their newfound religion with them.  Visitors to the coastal province of Fujian, for example, now hear South African accented English and see houses adorned with crosses.  African migrants are also moving to China in larger numbers, many of them practitioners of very evangelistic forms of Pentecostal Christianity who are willing to flout the rules placed on religious activity in China.

Christopher Rhodes “How Africa is converting China,” The Unherd

First things first, I cannot evaluate the accuracy of this story in pretty much any way, and The Unherd is a new media venture with maybe ideological leanings (?) that are giving me Quilette vibes. Nevertheless, I love hearing globalization stories that have nothing to do with the United States. One of the defining characteristics of US culture is its indifference to anything outside of it. Plus, both China (because of its ascendancy and trade powers) and Africa (because of its color and post-colonial politics) often operate as political opposite poles to the United States to the extent that Americans think about foreign policy at all.

It reminded me of this working definition of religion I’ve been toying with:

A religion is a system of attaching meaning to behavioral choices that creates a positive feedback loop whereby adherents gain a greater survival advantage as some combination of strict adherence to precepts, size of the community of adherents, or access to spiritual experience increases.

I have never had any formal education in religious studies, so maybe this is a 101 level insight, but it feels like it’s all my own and it speaks to some of the uneasiness I feel when some of the people around me go in on religious people. I think about the people in my own life for whom religion was a way to feel control and agency in their life, or for whom religion was the opening to being able to talk about and access an inner emotional life. Religious people can be shitty, but, like, maybe they would be even shittier without it?

I’m fascinated by dying churches. I play piano every now and then for a Norwegian Presbyterian Church here in a Portland Suburb, a dwindling congregation that once served an ethnic community that barely exists anymore. The churches and religions that are thriving right now are the ones who have figured out how to give a survival advantage to those who walk through their door. These Chinese, workers, for example, get to walk in the door and experience a feeling of community and common struggle in a context where that is hard to find.

It’s why I can’t imagine they will ever die. As long as living remains a challenge, there will be a need for some way to teach adaptation, and a secondary need to attach meaning to that adaptation. What used to be called New Age religion so thoroughly dominates American culture its practically indistinguishable from it. We might have way more atheists in this country than ever before, but there are also more folks practicing yoga, going on meditation retreats, consuming bone broth. Scientologists get it, you join, they get you auditions. Mormons understand it, if you’re a man they’ll set you up with a career and a family.

You want to start a new religion? Come up with your survival advantage. The rest of the patter will write itself.

➕ new.amsterdam ➕

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

New Amsterdam is a mediocre vodka, New Amsterdam is a bad TV show. I can’t stop watching it.

I made a conscious decision in college to stop hate-watching things because I was spending a lot of time with a friend, let’s call him Trip, that only seemed to hate-watch things that he thought was bad and it made me feel like I was only ever choosing to watch things I didn’t like. This is five or seven years later and I feel good about the movies I’ve watched since then.

In Trip’s defense, there were some common themes to the bad movies that he liked to watch. He loved movies where filmmakers were un-self-aware in various ways: uncool movies that unconvincingly treat uncool things as cool, movies where the screenwriter thinks they’re a god and too good for an editor and the actors are always a little confused, movies from other countries trying to introduce a new genre, movies with jarring and inexplicable shifts toward adolescent-boy lecherous tone. He loved what came when a creative team team was in a little over its head, like the faces you make when reaching for a dish on a shelf just out of your reach.

When I hate watch, I look for something different. I love to hate-watch movies and TV shows that are trying to copy something else but don’t seem to understand what made the original good. Sometimes formulas are copied and the copy is pretty good, or better than the original. If it works, I don’t care that it’s a copy. There’s an clunky uncanny valley that I find frustrating when part of the formula is right and part of it is wrong (here’s looking at you, Netflix originals and the entire Greg Berlanti TV universe). And then there are the copies that miss it completely. Complexity is simplified, the specific becomes generic, and characters are flattened like a pancake. Any part of the show that provokes the viewer to consider something differently is repurposed to cut a deeper groove into our preconceptions.

Which is what draws me to New Amsterdam. It’s a really, really bad copy of a copy of ER.

Hospital dramas are TV staples and will never go away because the setting lends itself so well to episodic stories. The stakes are inherently life and death, there are a lot of different things that motivate doctors, medical care touches people from all strata of society, and medicine is always at the center of our political and moral battleground. Patients come in and out, and doctors and nurses make new relationships with them in every episode.

ER premiered in 1994 and made a huge leap forward for hospital shows because of two special advantages. First, Michael Crichton, the series creator, was a doctor who had been a resident and was a perceptive enough observer of emergency rooms to get the emotional tone right. Second, Jurassic Park-era Steven Spielberg was the first executive producer, and it seems that his production choices led to better medical special effects than had ever been on TV. ER invested deeply in its cast, too. Certain characters got most of the attention, however background characters played by regular guest stars got to be real too. Different characters worked day shifts and night shifts. Malik, Jerry and Heleah all managed the intake stations and answered phones differently. Most importantly, ER understood what was dramatic about a TV show and (at least in the early seasons) did not underestimate its audience. We always got glimpses into character’s lives outside the hospital, but that was never the most interesting part of the show. What we knew about the rest of their lives allowed viewers to decode the emotions underneath the surface as characters went about their work.

New Amsterdam gets this hilariously wrong. It’s based on the fairly sober seeming and workmanlike memoir Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital  by Eric Mannheimer, but its hard to imagine him recognizing his work in the show. Doctors almost never practice any medicine. Background characters get no lines so even though the show is shot on a giant set with lots of extras, we only ever interact with about six doctors. Instead of exploring any number of inherently dramatic scenarios that happen in hospitals, all the drama is interpersonal and involves two characters conflicting then slowly telling the other four characters what is going on while ignoring the patients in front of them. Maybe the writers knew they were working with a turkey because the main character is (and I’m not joking): taking over the largest public hospital in New York, while mourning the death of his sister at the very same hospital, while his wife is having complications from a pregnancy, and also he has brain cancer.

But the worst thing of all, and the car crash that I can’t turn away from, is that it is the most blatantly cynical or un-self-aware (or both) White Savior story I have ever seen. I am surprised, and also not, that this got made in 2018. The implicit message of the show is that all of the ills of modern medicine: high medical bills, impersonal care, corporatization, lack of mental health care; all could be solved by a white man with unlimited authority. It’s Trump, M.D., and if you think that I’m overstating, the very first act of this incoming medical director is to fire all tenured doctors. [This is after an excruciating scene where the hospital’s janitors are gossiping in Spanish and the medical director responds in Spanish because he’s Down Like That™️ and Not That Kind of White™️]. His plan to turn the hospital around? I don’t know and neither does he because his only instruction to his doctors is to give a shit. This is meant to be inspiring.

It’s racist and cynical, but the reason I can’t look away is that it so deluded about what the challenges of the day are. Climate change, economic collapse, infrastructure deterioration, these are all big problems that are going to require big thinkers. But this show is so nakedly wishing for a simpler time when someone powerful like a doctor at the top of the pyramid could just order the reality he wanted and all the people in the jobs that don’t get lines on this show: the nurses, the janitors, orderlies, billing techs, patients; they all have to fall in line and make that reality. Through that lens, this show may be a part of white America coming to grips with the failure of the Trump presidency. New Amsterdam believes that the system we had in the past was pretty good, as long as you had someone goodhearted running it.

I don’t think it’s coming back.

⧑ the best/a man/can get ⧒

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Last week Gillette released an advertisement called The Best Men Can Be (25m+ views) which in 90 seconds presents this masculinity pageant: toxic masculinity has been perpetrated by men forever, now the #MeToo movement has shed light on it, now nothing will be the same, we’re not afraid of it because men can be better, here’s a couple of clips of men already being better.

This morning, I read this plainspoken line in Heather Havrilesky’s new book of essays, What If This Were Enough: “We are living in a time of extreme delusion, disorientation, and dishonesty.” There’s a fever going on right now and the dead-end racist, sexist bluster that is destroying our governmental infrastructure by pushing out government workers, the two documentaries about the fraud and waste of the Fyre Festival (resplendant in its stupid fucking novelty spelling), and Tony Blair grinning like a naughty schoolboy as he struggles to defend himself against the characterization of Davos as “a family reunion for the people who broke the modern world” all seem to be in dialogue with each other.

We’re also trapped in this this slow motion racist gaslighting sparked by a group of white boys from a Catholic school harassing a man they assumed had no power. When the public gave that man power through their attention, their parents circled to protect them and used every connection they had to take it back. A friendly CNN interviewer and the President helped them do it.

Last year, the Canadian government asked the Pope for an apology to the Inuit and Métis peoples for the role the church played in operating genocidal boarding schools and orphanages for Native children. A spokesman for the Pope responded: “After carefully considering the request and extensive dialogue with the bishops of Canada, he felt that he could not personally respond.”

Nick Sandmann, the boy from Covington, when asked if he felt like apologizing for his actions, said “I wish we could’ve walked away and avoided the whole thing, but I can’t say that I’m sorry for listening to (Phillips) and standing there.” In his written statement, he wrote, “I am a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me”.

Here’s what connects these phenomena: We are living through a time where the mechanism by which privilege perpetuates itself—by controlling the story and by controlling what context gets incorporated into the story—is becoming more and more nakedly visible as the divide between those who are benefitting from current political, cultural and economic conditions and those who must change those conditions in order to have a thriving future is becoming wider. Privilege is the power to say “you didn’t see what you saw. And if you did it wasn’t that bad. And if it is that bad, you should see what this other person did. And if you still have a problem with that, Jesus said ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.'”

It’s bullshit.

Here’s why the Gillette advertisement is bullshit, too:

  • Gillette’s shaving products do not play a significant role in gender-based violence or economic inequality. They did not, for example, run a PSA about not using single-use plastic items.
  • The advertisement perpetuates a fantasy alternate history where toxic masculinity was a thing that nobody knew was wrong, then #MeToo happened and men realized it was wrong and changed the world. You can’t simplify the narrative like that without performing the same erasure that toxic masculinity needs to perpetuate itself.
  • Gillette continues to sell rectangular razors to men in tough blue and gray boxes and oval razors to women in pretty pink and green boxes.
  • Gillette apparently believes that you solve toxic masculinity by being tough and intervening in fights and shouting positive affirmations at your daughter in the mirror*, as opposed to, say, looking at pay inequalities and family leave policies in their company and supply chain.
  • You cannot credit with–or protest–Gillette changing the culture of masculinity without imputing authority over masculinity to Gillette. Both sides reinforce the desired message, which is that buying Gillette is being a man.

*Which was very cute, I’m not a monster.

Pointing all of this out pedantic, because we all have a baseline expectation that power and bullshit go together. The government is so clogged with bullshit it cannot perform even the most basic functions. The church is so full of shit that people stopped going then discovered what a better social adaptation that is. Institutions that used to police bullshit like universities and newspapers now support themselves by distributing the bullshit (plus, we know that they only ever policed bullshit for white dominant culture, so even calling them the bullshit police is itself a kind of bullshit). Brands are bullshit, but they also seem to kind of work and are kind of accountable to the public sometimes so we give them feedback with love or scorn because that sometimes works and nothing else seems to work.

Gillette has total control over its workplace. It has control over its products, its marketing. It has a lot of influence over the city and state in which it has offices. It did not choose to make change in those spheres in which it has a lot of power. Instead, Gillette is trying to change the way you think about masculinity, which is a power that you have to give it.

So gender progressives have to pretend that liking an advertisement means supporting women and gender troglodytes have to pretend that their honor was sullied by a razor blades and queer folks have to pretend that a company that differentiates its products by gender are going to teach men to protect nonbinary kids and on and on and on…

I think all of that pretending has a cost. I think every time that we do it we erode, just a little bit, our ability to see what else could be possible, what real change would look like. Resisting, though, is not cute and feels useless. In my own real life, where I have total control over me, someone asked what I thought of the Gillette ad and I just shrugged and didn’t say anything.