#just two dudes who don’t know how to healthily communicate their feelings then everything gets jumbled up

[pendinganchor]

(before the post starts: to everyone who follows me for stranger things i’m sorry you have to deal with my random adventures into other fandoms — this is for the marauders fandom so if you don’t care about that feel free to scroll 💞 and also as always fuck jkr)

me: this fic is going to be so fucking full of angst and jealousy and toxicity with rosekiller endgame

also me:

It’s silent for a moment— Barty convinced the Gryffindor’s eyes could bore into his soul if he let him stare long enough. “You’ve never needed to simply feel something, Potter?”

-

[Barty] lowered his voice, a hand almost absently reaching up to the other boy’s face. His middle finger ran down his jawline. “What does [Regulus] see in you?”

“What-?”

“He’s never looked at me the way he looks at you. What are you doing that I wasn’t?”

-

“I can move. Do you want-“

“No, stay.” James laid back down. It was dark, but Barty reached up anyway. His hand started in James’ hair then ran down to his cheek. His middle finger traced his jaw again— like it had that night on the tower. “I can see what he sees in you now.”

me in some tags AFTER i wrote the stuff above:

BRO OPEN YOUR FUCKING EYES YOU SHIP IT AND THIS IS HAPPENING

[houseofvans]

ART SCHOOL | IN SESSION WITH ROB SATO

From vibrant rainbows to familiar yet alien landscapes occupied by strange beings, LA based artist Rob Sato’s works are filled with creative energy in a loose minimalistic style. From watercolor, digital medium to acrylics and oil, Rob’s artworks and illustrations have been shown in various galleries from Giant Robot 2 to the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, where recently his original paintings for a comic called 442 were exhibited. We’re excited to chat with Rob about his work, his various collaborations and what he’s got coming up for the rest of the year.  Take the Leap!

Photographs courtesy of the artist.

Introduce yourself Hello, my name is Rob Sato. I’m an artist, illustrator, and writer. Something people might not know about me is that I was a kid I was so fanatical about the Oakland A’s that when they lost in the World Series I threw a tantrum so big that I destroyed my bedroom and after that I felt so stupid I quit following baseball. Also, I’m told I have maybe one of the great poop stories of the world. It can only be related in person, so ask me about it sometime if we ever meet.

How would you describe your work and style? Eclectic? Kaleidoscopic? I’ve never had a concise answer to this question. I tend not to pin myself down because I think if I did, I’d stop making things. 

Art is my outlet for the cryptic and obscure as well as the gushing spillover of foolish idealism and wild fantasy. It’s the only place I’ve ever found where you can healthily play with unhealthy thoughts, where you can explore undefined emotions, things that lurk out in the corners of consciousness that may be embarrassing or uncontrollable.

I love to make entertainment and decorative work, things that tend to be obvious, that communicate very clearly and reveal all their cards, but I also love to make work that hides things, that actively resists easy understanding or recognition and risks being super personal or unrelatable and strange. This can make things difficult, especially in the ongoing deterioration of attention spans, but I can’t help but pursue things outside of a pop sensibility and logical thought. I have to be, much of the time, in mental wildernesses. It’s hard to get there, hard to be there, and hard to come back, but it keeps me going.

Tell us about how you really started getting into art, and how that turned into what you do now? Was it something you always intended to pursue? I’ve drawn every single day for as long as I can remember. I never really thought about it. It just seems to be what I do. It’s how I have fun, how I solve problems, how I think. I’ve wanted to pursue other things like make movies or write books, but I always find myself drawing. Before I know it, it’s time for bed again.

When you are working on a new piece or upcoming exhibition or show? What’s your process like? What themes do you find yourself taking on? I explode. I used to plan things in a very directed way, but lately I’ve just let my brains spill out everywhere. I make a ton of drawings and paintings, and try my best to be fearless and open. Most of it produces failure after failure, but it shows me what might be worth building on, plus many exciting surprises reveal themselves in the process. As a show nears I start seeing what things fit together, what needs to be edited out, and how it all might form a cohesive exhibition. Sometimes the subject matter is the glue that makes everything stick, other times it’s the aesthetics. Alongside the explosion I usually have 2 or 3 pieces going at any given time that I’ve had long term plans for. These pieces can take take months or even years. 

Thematically I’m all over the place. War and peace, realism and surrealism, grim realities and escapism, sober observations and dumb jokes.

What are some of your go-to art making materials? Are there mediums you want to explore that you’ve yet to get your hands on? I feel pretty comfortable with anything you can use to make a mark on a piece of paper. I’ve mainly used watercolor and various drawing tools for the past several years. I’m been having fun with acrylics and oils again, and I’ve started to play around with photography a little. I’ve had ideas for sculpture and film for years that I’d really like to finally get to. What I really want to get my hands on is more time.

Where do you find inspiration? What kind of things or people inspire what you make? Watching someone pick their nose listening to headphones and singing softly to themselves in line at the grocery store. Just watching my cat live her weird life. Even though the final artwork may not really show it, these places are usually where my ideas originate. Art has also been a place where I can put memories that have some abstract need to be recorded.

I made this series of drawings called “Bad Hands”, which started out with me laughing at these dumb hands I was drawing with academically incorrect anatomy. Abandoning correctness felt so good. In the process it triggered a memory from High School. I had been forbidden from drawing in one of my classes, so I was contorting my hands into different shapes at my desk to amuse myself. There was a hysteria over gang activity in the school at the time and the teacher freaked out thinking I was throwing gang signs and I ended up getting sent to detention. 

At detention I was talking with a friend and made fun of the teacher for her mistake. A kid who was in a gang overheard and then HE misunderstood and thought I was making fun of gangs or something. On my way home from school he and a couple dudes punched and kicked me for a bit while I tried and failed to explain. I think it’s funny. 

So embedded in that piece is this tumbling series of misunderstandings, these multiple layers of hands being perceived as bad, speaking in an absurd language that communicates different things to different people. I know people aren’t going to see all those layers in the final piece, but that’s where it comes from and I hope it at least sparks some thoughts about talking with our hands, and where else can you follow this kind of train of thought except in art?

I get inspired by artists who seem to approach art as an intuitive discovery process rather than a  pursuit of mastery, that play is one of the more important aspects of making things. My wife, Ako, has been a huge influence on me in this respect. She’s continuously playing with various materials around her at any given time and finding out what she can do with them. Everywhere she goes she abandons a nest made of fresh creations she’s manifested out of mud, string, packaging, plants, uneaten rice, her used drinking straw, lint and whatever else was within her reach

You’ve done a lot of collaborations with companies, museums and art galleries. Do you have a favorite collaboration, and what about the collaboration do you enjoy the most? I’ve recently been collaborating with Tiny Splendor, an indie publisher and printer who have studios in LA and Oakland. It’s been really great working with them, Cynthia Navarro in LA on risographs, and with Max Stadnik, who runs the print shop in Oakland. 

Max has been returning to lithography, my favorite traditional printing medium, and he printed a piece of mine inspired by mushrooms called “Growerings". It’s a full 5 color print, which means it took five separate plates and each print had to go through the press 5 times. It turned out more beautifully than I could have hoped for. Litho is a super difficult but also very fun process and the results are so rich. 

I think I particularly love this collaboration because the image fits the medium so well, and the combination of the two elevates the final piece of work, When it works, the artwork and the print become more than just an image on a piece of paper. It’s more alive in some undefinable way.

Since we’re called Art School, we always ask the artists to give us their favorite art tip? Never force the thing you think you want, you’ll probably miss out on the really interesting thing that’s happening. Also, don’t drink too much coffee. I have trouble taking both of these pieces of my own advice every day.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not making stuff? How do you chill out? I read and run. I love coffee and I love gossip and talking nonsense with friends. Also, I cannot stop watching Terrace House.

What is the last art show that you went to? What artists should folks keep an eye out for? I recently went to the Velveteria in LA’s Chinatown, which is one man’s collection of paintings on velvet. A very entertaining and very fucked up experience. I went to a life drawing session at Subliminal Projects and got to draw surrounded by Chad Kouri’s fun abstracts. I’m actually typing this interview inside an art show right now. 

I’m here at my wife, Ako Castuera’s, show “Soil” at the Weingart Gallery at Occidental College. We’re here feeding worms. She sculpted this beautiful ceramic vermiculture composter for the show. It’s a grand temple for worms. The show is an act of gratitude for the exchange we have with the soil which provides the clay for ceramics, and for the worms who turn decay into healthy earth to grow new life in. 

She sculpted a menagerie of creatures out of the worm poop that also populate the show. Super fun. Speaking of Ako and Subliminal, her show there with Hellen Jo and Kris Chau this past December was one of those once-in-a-lifetime powerhouse gathering of forces. That may have been the best show I’ve ever seen.

What advice would you give someone thinking about following in your footsteps? What’s something you learned that you want to pass along to art making newbies. Don’t listen to advice if it is extremely quotable. Pay no attention to it especially if it accompanies a photo of a famous artist and fits perfectly into an instagram post. If it’s easy to remember then it’s probably empty, crap inspiration. Those things are entertainments and not words to live by.

 If you’re interested in making art you’ll keep making it. It takes day in, day out patience and exploration and mutation to discover how you really work, not some idea of how an artist works. 

Sometimes it will be very hard, sometimes it will be so breathtakingly easy you think that your problems have been solved forever. Neither situation ever lasts, but cultivate and nurture your curiosity and what you love, and you’ll find ways to make it through the rough times and keep on making things one way or another.

Who are some of your favorite artists to follow and/or see in a show? Lately I’ve been really enjoying the work of Nathaniel Russell whose work makes this great space where funny, grounded matter-of-factness and sweet nothingness sit comfortably together. His drawing also reminds me of Ben Shahn, my all-time favorite drawer. 

I really like Amy Bennet’s oils, these intimate studies of isolation in suburbia where mundanity overlaps with quiet drama and melancholy. Her work obliquely reminds me of Edwin Ushiro’s work, though his stuff is the opposite of melancholic. He captures almost incidental but haunted moments from growing up in Hawaii and infuses them with warmth, and it’s in a style influenced in a super personal way by animation. It reminds me of Satoshi Kon’s movies in its well observed, slice-of-life elements. Edwin’s sketchbooks are a treasure too.  Esther Pearl Watson’s recent autobiographical paintings, Hellen Jo’s latest badass watercolors, Amber Wellman’s funny, playful oil paintings, and Matthew Palladino’s watercolors are also favorites. 

Megan Whitmarsh’s work is some of my favorite to see in person. Her installation with Jade Gordon at the Hammer’s “Made In LA “ show was maybe the funnest work I’ve ever seen and interacted with. I went to see the Ai Wei Wei show at the Marciano Foundation, which I thought was impressive in scale and execution but still somehow lame, but I stumbled on a Mike Kelley installation/ video piece I’d never seen before in the upstairs collection and loved it so much, but I can’t remember the name of it at the moment. 

It’s 2 videos shown side by side of the same guy wearing a cape singing almost the same song simultaneously, but each version has different words at different points. It’s a love song but one version is more bitter and mean and one is sickly sweet. Anyway, highly recommended!

What do you have coming up the rest of the year that you can share with us?  For just a few more days there’s a show up at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center with a bunch of my original paintings for a comic I illustrated about the 442, the Japanese American Army unit of World War II. Plus it has some personal work about Japanese American Incarceration and images from my family’s experience in the concentration camps. My grandfather was incarcerated in the Arkansas camps, and he was a soldier in the 442. 

Next up, I’m in a slew of group shows all happening within a few weeks of each other this month. Poor scheduling on my part as usual, but it’s nice to be invited to so many. I just sent off my piece to the “Seeing Red” show curated by Jeff Hamada of the BOOOOOOOM art and culture blog. That show will be at Thinkspace in LA. Giant Robot has been kind enough to host another solo show for me in September. 

I’ve been busy experimenting with some more 3d stuff that pushes the more narrative side of my work which I hope to show there. We’ll see how the experiments turn out. I’ve also been working on a ton of prints and ideas for books. This year I want to focus on working in print, making zines and comics, and writing a lot more. 

FOLLOW ROB | INSTAGRAM | WEBSITE | SHOP 

[nattytumbles-blog1]

Ketamine for Depression Parts I and II: Thoughts on God and Kanye

It is the Monday following a weekend I spent receiving two infusions of ketamine. Here’s how it went.

Day 1: Getting to Know the Doc, Infusion #1

I was so nervous about my first infusion — would my husband find the place okay, and on time? Would my FSA work, or would I have to put a grand on my personal credit card? Most importantly: would it work, or be another waste of my time and money, like Prozac, Lexapro, Celexa, Cymbalta, Effexor, Wellbutrin, Abilify, Latuda, Lithium, et. al. were?

The doctor put many of my anxieties to rest. He explained how ketamine worked, vs. other medications. Whereas most antidepressants basically dump a bunch of serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, or GABA on your nervous system, “If I took a biopsy of your neurons,” he said, “there’d be sad-looking dendrites, a worn-out myelin sheath — it would be useless to add more neurotransmitters because the physical structures needed to communicate across nerves would be broken.”

“It’s like putting a brand new car on a broken highway,” I suggested, thinking of the giant “crack” in the bridge I sometimes use to commute home from work — a bridge closed for repairs for the next few months.

“That, or putting new software on a broken computer,” he said. 

Too much cortisol, especially during developmental years, can cause actual structural damage in the nerves, he explained. After you reach adulthood, it’s popularly thought that you can’t regrow those nerves and pathways — but that’s not exactly true. Neurogenesis is possible, and exercise is thought to benefit depression because of the growth of new nervous infrastructure.

Ketamine speeds up that process considerably, though. It’s almost like being a teenager again, but only in terms of brain development. 

None of this is definitive, of course — brain science is still very much new terrain — but as that MDD patient who hasn’t responded to anything else, the perfect candidate for ketamine therapy, I was encouraged by this explanation.

“You won’t hallucinate at all,” he said. “There’s an out-of-body experience that most patients find pleasurable, but we can stop the infusion at any point if it grows uncomfortable.” I interpreted this as a nice way of saying, “You’re gonna get high, but you won’t be in the k-hole.” 

Not long after he hooked me up to the drip, however, I realized my interpretation was conservative. To put it mildly, I tripped balls.

No, I didn’t hallucinate. There were no visuals. But I did experience a strong sense of euphoria, as well as the sense that everything was connected. “God is here,” I said. “God’s been here all along.” I was crying. I felt important, like an irreplaceable part of the Universe. It was a beautiful notion, but the experience was almost unbearably intense, even in a good way. After the doctor removed my IV, I thought to myself, “How do kids do this recreationally? And at such huge doses? Can I even handle this intensity tomorrow?”

On the way home, I didn’t feel much except tired. Profoundly tired. I slept off the rest of the afternoon.

Day #2: Second Infusion, And Noticing How Beautiful the Sky Was

The second infusion was much less intense than the first, thankfully. Yes, I was still euphoric. Yes, I was still thinking things I wouldn’t necessarily think while sober. For example, I asked my husband if he thought Kanye would be friends with me, if we had a nice chat over lunch or something.

“He’s so creative,” I said. “I think we could make cool music together. Do you think he’d like my ideas? He’d like me, right? Kanye and I could be friends, right?”

I forget how my husband responded, but I imagine he was probably just laughing. I did email my friend a message including the sentence, “I have a lot of thoughts about Kanye!” I then remembered that I really shouldn’t communicate with the outside world while on ketamine.

It was on the way home that I first started noticing things. Subtle things. How beautiful the sky was, sunny. How handsome my husband is — something I intellectually recognize every day, but also don’t really appreciate on a visceral level, as depression murders my ability to enjoy things.

That’s the thing with depression: it’s more than just the addition of sadness. It’s also the subtraction of joy, a very real hollowing out of everything that makes life worth living. I’ve had drugs make me feel less desperate to kill myself, and reported those results to my therapist excitedly.

“So you’re starting to enjoy things again?” my therapist asked me once. I was bowled over by the question. No, my piano still held no promises of joy as it once did, and I still felt no real desire to be physically close to my husband (or any human, really). I was just relieved not to be literally on the edge of a cliff.

Cautious Optimism

I don’t want to try my luck. I don’t want to call things too soon. “I’m sure you’ve encountered plenty of patients too scared to be optimistic,” I told my ketamine doctor. Every new drug or therapy I’ve tried came with a week of hopeful placebo effect — just the notion that I wasn’t completely out of options gave me a temporary lift. 

One which, inevitably, failed to last more than a week or two. Consider that most antidepressants take four weeks to kick in chemically, and that data was pretty dismal. I’d ride it out the full four to six weeks, and then bury any hope I could get better. 

I have three more infusions left in the initial beginning load, after which I’ll get “booster” infusions every four weeks or so. It’s thought that getting six infusions out of the way in the first 12 days maximizes the neurogenesis and other antidepressant effects of the treatment. Because the clinic has weekend hours, that means only two sick days, which I appreciate. I’ve mentioned this before, but I really love my job. Strange thing for such a depressed person to say, isn’t it?

But that’s how I know this is, to borrow a tragically flawed term, a “chemical imbalance.” I love my job, my husband, my little family of kitty cats and doggo, my actual little family of three little siblings, their wonderful partners, and my hilarious and loving parents. I’ve certainly endured more trauma than someone my age can be expected to emerge from healthily, but that’s in the past, and intellectually, I’ve made sense of it all.

Now that my thoughts are right, my emotions fail to follow. And that, I hope, is what the ketamine therapy patches up. Therapy modalities like CBT and DBT promise that by fixing the thoughts, you fix the emotional state, and my inputs haven’t resulted in the targeted output. I have a great attitude, plenty of gratitude, but a lousy mood.

I grow new neurons as I type this. Hang on, little dudes. I haven’t given up on you yet.