Cirque du Malaise

Things That Will Disappear

outsideeye — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:18:10 PDT

A friend recently forwarded me a viral email called “9 Things That Will Disappear in Our Lifetime.” The things:

The post office
The check
The newspaper
The book
The landline
Music
Television
Things you own
Privacy

Whoever originally wrote this is probably right about 90% of it, but what I find really interesting is the insinuation that the loss of these things is bad.

As a lifelong letter writer, I do think it’s sad that the post office is on its way out, however, I have embraced email like the child I never had, so, I think I’ll probably live. And given my recent experiences with the post office - like the thoughtful package full of handmade things and a handwritten letter which I recently sent a friend, that just flat-out never arrived - I wonder if maybe the post office has already seen its heyday. There are a lot of things the loss of which would be more wildly tragic. Like antibiotics. Or heated seat warmers in cars. And if you never had to wait in another post office line or deal with another surly asshole who works at the post office - would your life really be worse? There’s always FedEx and UPS.

I haven’t read an actual paper newspaper in as long as I can remember. I have an iPad, and I get a lot of my news off Twitter, honestly. I haven’t had a landline in over ten years. Although I do have this old phone that I am using as décor:

I don’t own a television (although I do watch a lot of really, really terrible and mind-numbing television on the Internet and I have to say I don’t see that one going away anytime soon, nor commercials, as they seem to be the backbone of our economy).

Books, though - yeah, that makes me sad. Really sad.

I actually do enjoy reading on my iPad. Apple has this shiz dialed - you can adjust the dimmer so it has the same sheen as an actual book page, and the lettering is adjustable too. It does not bother my eyes, and the tablet is comfortable to hold. I read several books on my iPad when I was in Thailand last fall and I really appreciated not having to lug actual books around with me.

However, I still like to read real books when I can. I have a no-electronics policy in my bedroom (it’s a feng shui faux-Quaker thing) and so when I crawl under my down comforter, quilt and sleeping bag every night with my book that I checked out of the actual brick and mortar library, I am reenacting a ritual that I’ve been engaging in since I was very small. The density of the book, the smell of the pages, the tactile feedback about how far through the story I am… these things all contribute to the experience of getting “lost in the pages.” I don’t know about anyone else, but I read to get away. Reading - especially novels - is the most distracting, imaginative, relaxing experience I have in my life on a regular basis. I can’t imagine a life without books, but honestly, I don’t really expect to have to.

I read this recently in a Rolling Stone interview with George RR Martin, who wrote the books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series (in other words, Game of Thrones):

Oh - I get asked for book recommendations a lot. Here are my favorite books. I add to this list each time I finish a worthy book. The last one I added: No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July. I loved this book of short stories. Miranda July is the best kind of weirdo.

Virtuous to Depraved: A Sliding Scale

outsideeye — Sun, 06 May 2012 21:03:56 PDT

Chart to measure the level of goodness of a person based on casual observation, according to my own personal moral code, and in the absence of more pressing ethical tests. This is a purely subjective scale and exists at the whims of mood and circumstance and recent conversations I’ve had.

People who unplug their modem when they leave the house so as not to waste extra electricity (eg my sister in law)

People who work with the elderly

People who compost

People who give people rides to the airport

People who teach their children to be bilingual even if only by hiring a Mexican nanny

People who eat meat but only “non-CAFO, organic, locally pasture-raised” meat

People who claim they donate to sperm banks because they “want to give single moms a chance to have family” but are really just 23 and in grad school and need money to buy pot

People who occasionally wear a vintage rabbit fur vest but only because it was a hand-me-down and really, really cute

People who “reply all” to social invitations for no reason

People who still think that the phone is the best way to contact someone

People who exaggerate the French pronunciation of “croissant”

People who correct other people’s pronunciation of random foreign words one would have no practical reason to know how to pronounce

People who use Facebook to robotically promote platitudes and messages of vapid positivity ad nauseum

People who are vegan and like to talk about the righteousness of it but have problems with honesty, integrity and kindness in their actual human relationships

People who kill spiders

People who talk or text through movies, concerts, comedy night or storytelling events

People who are rude to waitresses

Western Venture

outsideeye — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 21:27:16 PDT

I spent this fine summer weekend in Pt. Reyes and Bodega Bay.
Here are some things I noticed.

Antiquated fridge.

Backlit nostalgia.

Rusty.

The pier behind Nick's Cove at sunset.

And at breakfast.

Wind.Gretel.

Mt. Wittenberg, Pt. Ryes
[ verdant fields of opulent torture ]

I Don't Get Lonely When I'm Alone

outsideeye — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:57:45 PDT

Tennessee Valley might be my favorite place in the world. I love it in all its incarnations: bucolic sunny splendor, refuge for delicate wildlife (and introverts), happliy trafficked weekend days, moonlit nights with owls hooting. But perhaps my favorite Tennessee Valley mood is lonely, stormy spring evening. Last night I walked to the beach alone, listening to an ominous Radiolab podcast about a necrophiliac serial killer (perhaps not the best choice for a solo hike at dusk), but I didn't feel lonely. I don't get lonely when I'm alone. In fact, strangely, the only time feel lonely is when I'm surrounded by people. Perhaps all introverts are this way.

I spent a lot of time by myself growing up. When I think about the things I used to do for fun when I was 8, they haven’t really changed all that much: reading, making up stories, hanging out at the library, adventuring around in the woods by myself.

Because I live in a very ¡fun! Place (the Bay Area), and I have a lot of ¡fun! friends who go to Burning Man and costume parties and other ¡fun! stuff, I am constantly getting invited to social goings-on. I almost always say no. Often. When I say “no thanks” to a party, I’ll generally get the cajoling, “come on, it'll be fun” beg from the friend in question. It’s almost as if they think, if they could just get me to go to a party/festival/block party/rock concert just this once, I would realize that I really do in fact like huge group gatherings; I’ve been wrong this whole time; I am a whole different person than I think I am.

Occasionally I acquiesce and go to a party. 97% of the time, I regret it. Parties are not my thing. I usually end up huddled in a corner with the person I came with, desperately avoiding eye contact and taking frequent trips to the bathroom, where I can get brief moments of respite in a stall by myself.

That's not to say that I'm not social. I go for hikes with my friends; I go to yoga (not really) with my friends; I go to movies with my friends; I make dinner with my friends. Sometimes I do those things with my friends, and sometimes I do them by myself. I like both.

I’m glad I’m not a person who needs constant company to keep me grounded. I’m glad I need lots and lots of alone time. In my prior life as a Romantic With Hope, I always dated outgoing, sociable guys who liked parties and Halloween and Bay to Breakers and all those things that make me highly anxious. More and more, now that I am committed to remaining single and solitary, I am a shut-in. I’m not planning to try to be different any time soon. The nice thing about being 40 and single? I can be exactly who I want to be.

Want to be a better person? Read novels.

outsideeye — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 14:50:29 PDT

Want to be a better person? Read novels.

And put that self help book down.

I wrote a little something for Elephant Journal on why I don't read self help books and how science backs me up.

Bitters Brewing

outsideeye — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:25:56 PDT

Everything Doesn't Mean Something

outsideeye — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 09:42:37 PDT

On Tuesday I went to see Sally Mann speak at City Arts & Lectures. I bought the ticket as a gift to my 21-year-old self, who, once a lost and lonely art school student at a giant university, really adored her but could never have afforded to see her give a presentation at the time, even if she had come all the way to bleak, rancid Syracuse New York. Consider it a late 21st birthday present.

I haven’t thought about Sally Mann in years and meanwhile, my own photography is much more haphazard than it ever was before. These days, I only take pictures with my iPhone - although, arguably, it’s the best camera I’ve ever had. However, I was intrigued to see what Sally has been up to all these years, and curious if she would talk about Immediate Family: the series of photographs that made her famous in the early 90s and rocked the art world by bringing into question whether the National Endowment of the Arts should be allowed to give grants to whomever they pleased. For those of you that don’t remember this art world scandal, Immediate Family was a series of starkly beautiful black and white photographs of Sally Mann’s children and land in Virginia. In a lot of the pictures, the kids are naked and dirty, and although they were all under the age of ten at the time, certain people had a real problem with this. She was accused of child abuse and child pornography and all manner of lascivious and immoral behavior. It was a furor that rocked the art world and the NEA.

I went by myself to the event this week, which is something I like to do when I really, really don’t want to miss a moment of something, and I was glad I did. The evening consisted of a slide show of photos from her portfolio as well as snapshots from her childhood and life as an artist. At the same time, she read from her memoirs. The idea of a photographer writing memoirs might seem juxtaposey, but in truth she is an incredibly articulate woman with a charming Virginia accent, and it was quite lovely. She read about her childhood and her infatuation with horses, the farm she grew up on in Lexington, how she met her husband and his family, and finally, how Immediate Family came to be.

This series made a huge impact on me as a fledgling artist and the photos, viewed again 20 years later, are still just as viscerally beautiful and strangely creepy. She said that she is often asked if she would do it all over again if she knew then what she later learned about how the public (or at least right wing media) would react. And she said yes, of course she would. And she also revealed that a lot of the photos - which were deconstructed to mean dark, nefarious things by her critics, who searched for the symbolism and the hidden messages - were in reality just portraits of her kids in picturesque situations.

As someone who does not look for signs, symbolism or even the greater meaning of things, but believes that life is just like this, I was greatly relieved to hear an artist of her caliber say that sometimes she takes pictures simply because she likes the way the light is hitting something. That’s the thing that is so interesting about art: you have to interpret it from your own personal experience and way of seeing the world. Which makes it even more oddball that people who saw villainous intentions in her pictures pointed the finger at her for being the picture-maker. In truth, those stories were self-invented. As are most.

BTW I don’t feel comfortable stealing her photos to show you here, but I highly encourage you to check them out on her web site: sallymann.com

"You Are Really Not Going To Like This"

outsideeye — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:41 PDT

I threw out my shoulder-ish area doing yoga a bunch of days ago. Yup, that’s right, doing yoga. So for those of you that say you can’t get injured doing yoga, um, you can. (And on that note, have you read Vanessa’s interview with William J Broad on Recovering Yogi? He’s the New York Times writer who wrote The Science of Yoga and subsequently got slammed throughout the entire righteous, holier than thou yoga community for daring to suggest that you can actually get hurt doing the physical postures.)

The thing about this particular injury that was so awesome is that it actually happened while I was lying around watching Parks & Rec on Hulu. One minute I was trying to drink my tea without actually sitting up, and dribbling it all over my hoody*; the next I was hunched over in pain. But, with the help of my astute squadron of bodyworkers, I am feeling slightly less old and feeble. I traced the whole thing back to some particularly nefarious chaturangas I had done two days earlier. If you ever want to really whack out your thoracic, try this one-two approach:

Spend 4 days on the East Coast subsisting on Dunkin Donuts while constantly sitting in a car or airplane.
Then jump back into your yoga routine by doing a really hard yoga class next to your ex-boyfriend, who you ran into at yoga, and who, the last time he saw you, saw a much skinnier, younger version of you.

No bueno. I am not awesome at being sick or injured. I slide very quickly into a self-pitying miasma of woe and hopelessness. So, sorry for all of you who had to deal with it. And thanks to those of you that offered a healing hand. A special thanks to Andrew.

Andrew is a San Francisco acupuncturist who I’ve been seeing for about ten years, maybe even a little bit more. He specializes in sports injuries and pain and he is really flipping good at what he does. What he did for me last night was give me some needles in just the right spots, and then hook up some of them to the e-stim machine. Don’t make the same mistake I did and google this; I’ll just tell you. “E-stim” is short for electro-stimulation, and is basically electroshock therapy, although Andrew wouldn’t hook it up to my brain, even though I practically begged. Once the muscles chilled out from the needles and the vibration of the e-stim, he gave me a tough love massage. The muscles that were jacked were my subscapulari (plural I just made up for both of the subscapularis muscles, which live in that no-touch zone under the shoulder blades - the scapula - and are basically impossible to reach). He got into my under-the-shoulder-blade area by way of my armpit. This is how he prepped me for this episode:

“You are really not going to like this.”

Not what you want to hear while you are getting a massage.

I was crying and whining the entire time. It was intensely, awesomely painful. And it totally helped. My shoulder and neck feel way better today. I could go into some whole poetic metaphor about how sometimes you have to go through the fire to get to the clear, or how it hurt so good, or something else equally literarily redonquilous, but I’ll just leave it at this: Andrew is a genius, and you should all go to him for your injuries, yoga or other.

Oh, and he’s also awesome to talk to and doesn’t at all mind if you whine a lot! Right, Andrew? Right?

This is actually a picture that a professional photographer took of Andrew giving me acupuncture once. Long story why I even have this, but the photographer is Quinn Wharton and he's very talented too.

* Yes, I am single. Why do you ask?

Letter To Myself

outsideeye — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:39:09 PDT

The other day I got a letter in the mail. I recognized the handwriting right away, because it was my own. No return address. "That's odd," I thought. "When did I find the time to write myself a letter?"

Then I remembered that I took a yoga workshop on New Year's Day with Christy Brown in Pt. Reyes, during which we took a timeout to write ourselves a letter. Christy must have just mailed them.

This is an old journaling workshop trick that I adore. You write yourself a letter - about your hopes, your dreams, your desires, your goals - and then you have someone else mail it at an unspecified time in the future. By the time you get it, you don't remember ever writing it, and it's as if someone else (someone who loves you very much and really, really cares about your welfare!) wrote it to you. It's quite lovely.

With Christy, a longtime friend of mine and expert yoga workshop teacher, I will be co-leading a retreat in Santa Barbara the first weekend in May. Special guest Helge Hellberg, a renowed sustainable food expert, will be there to talk to us about eating locally and organically (which, incidentally, we'll be doing that weekend).

Now I have to think of a way to top the ol' postponed-letter journaling trick. I'll think of something. Won't you join me there?

. . . . . . . . .
ECOLOGY OF SELF:
A May 2012 Weekend Retreat
in Santa Barbara . . . . . . . . .

Read more and please consider joining us for what I'm expecting to be a really lovely weekend in the Santa Barbara hills by the sea!

How to Make a Piano

outsideeye — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:44:33 PDT

On my brother’s infallible recommendation, I watched a documentary the other night called Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037. It’s about the factory in Queens where they make Steinway pianos - the Cadillacs of the piano world.

This movie was sincerely one of the most moving and riveting things I have ever seen. The filmmaker chose, at random, a grand piano whose birth and fate was tracked from the logging mill in Alaska where the wood was born to its final destination in Carnegie Hall. The process of making a Steinway takes almost a year, and is an intricate and elaborate affair. Steinway is one of the last piano companies to survive the falling-out-of-favor of pianos, and they still make every single piano entirely by hand in the exact same way they did a hundred years ago. The piano is an incredibly complex instrument with many parts, and every single part is created and attached by hand. Each person who works in the factory has exactly one job - a job they do perfectly and over and over.

There’s a guy who’s spent the last 40 years of his life hand-chiseling divets into the part that holds the pin that holds the piano wire. Someone else hand-shapes each key. Another person strings it.There are three different people who tune the piano in different ways. The thing spends a month just being tuned. Every inch of it - even the parts you’ll never see - is perfectly handcrafted and designed.

Every person that works in that factory has reverence for their job and the artwork they are creating. The love and care and perfection and artistry that goes into each piano is breathtaking. That’s why Steinways are so expensive and why they are considered the best concert and parlor pianos in the world. Each piano, because it’s made by hand, has its own sound and its own disposition. So musicians are very particular about which one they play.

Back in the day, everyone had a piano in their parlor. But now, it seems, only the very rich and classical-inclined bother. So the piano business is sort of a dying art. However, it’s a rarified art that should not be allowed to go extinct. That would be a very sad day indeed.

I don’t play piano, although I once thought I could.

When I was little, my mom, who worked nights as a waitress, one day brought home a piano. My Great Aunt Beatrice was a one-room-schoolteacher in rural Vermont, and I think it was through these school connections that my mom got her hands on a free piano that no one wanted anymore.

It was really not a great piano. It was an upright, and it had been painted sea foam green. It was never tuned. It was ugly, and no one in my house even knew how to play piano (although my mother once did, rumor has it - she is probably going to read this and protest that she still does, in theory).

I took a mild interest in this piano for a period of time. I learned to play the requisite Chopsticks and maybe a few Christmas carols. I liked the idea of being able to play the piano. But, like many things in my life, rather than actually do the thing, I read about it instead. When I should have been practicing, I would curl up in a corner with the enormous hardcover collection of books about classical composers that my mother had also brought home one day. I became riveted by stories of Chopin and Mozart and Beethoven. I was stoked when that movie Amadeus came out, because I already knew the debaucherous story by the time I was ten.

I never really did learn to play that piano, and neither did Elia. Eventually it turned into another flat surface for us to pile books on. I think that piano is probably still in my mom’s foyer. It’s never been tuned, as far as I know, and the thing probably hasn’t been played in 20 years. But I will say this: I still love Classical music, and particularly when it's heavy on the piano.

When I watched Note By Note last night, I felt sad for the old piano languishing away in my mom's "parlor." But it made me realize how much my mom prioritized creativity in her children. Which, as far as I am concerned, is the singular most important thing a parent can do.

Oh and if you are into parlor pianos and things old people do that are super cool, please check out the new creative project I just launched with Leslie Munday: Elderchic!