How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Started Loving those Anxious Tendencies…

Omar Kholeif
Jul 20, 2017 · 9 min read

INT. Bedroom — DAY

It’s Saturday morning. I am at my home in London because my appendix has recently burst. Encouraged by the doctors at Whittington Hospital to avoid travel for the foreseeable future — I am missing a biennial opening around the Mediterranean. My alarm sounds off. It’s 7.15 am. I’ve chosen to ‘lie in’ today. I pull a pillow over my face and screech, a cry of anguish. My to-do list forms in the corner of my eye as an imagined hologram: this is an addiction of my own making.

CUT TO:

I am rummaging around endless stacks of books and photocopied excerpts from exhibition catalogues, searching for a biography of the hyperactive technology mogul Elon Musk –given to me recently by my most energetic and excitable of friends, who has recently informed me of the ‘urgency’ of such a read. A self-made man, also African, also an émigré, Musk made something of himself (TESLA, PAYPAL, SPACEX, to name some examples) with little means. I hope that inhaling a few pages might propel me into a daily course-a schedule that has developed its own freewheeling agency without my own consent (or so I think at least).

FLASH FORWARD:

1.5 coffee shots later and I am running or shall I say jogging half-heartedly, stop starting along the semi-peaceful local park in a torn t-shirt and my partner’s swimming trunks: my thighs chafe at each angled swerve. The thick clouds overhead gradually dissipate giving way to a beating sun. With this, a foray of carved male figures transpires on my jogging trail. To avoid another pang of self-loathing, I close my eyes, pull up my shorts over my love handles and stagger forward to the sounds of a female vocalist whose 5–7 octave vocal range serves as my mantra. After 3 minutes I give up, hop onto a park bench, and open up my gmail –archiving messages into folders is the most soothing and satiating of daily activities.

JUMP BACK:

I’m checking my PayPal account: I’ve spent £600 in ubers in one month. I need to walk to more places I tell myself. I start to chase invoices: Greater Manchester Arts Centre (still within the 30 day waiting period), Camera Austria (cannot find invoice), Villa Stuck (Overdue), Rhizome (not invoiced), and etcetera.

PUSH FORWARD:

I am still on a bench, relieved that one my inboxes has been cleared. I survey my surroundings –couples, endless streams of them are picnicking. I never much liked picnicking: a nostalgic, over-romanticised act. Often leads to pins and needles. A wet buttock cheek or two is almost always guaranteed.

INT. Shower — DAY

I am singing, ‘men, men, men, men, men, men, men, many… many …MEN!’ Vocal warm-up.

My aunt was a well-known Egyptian singer and actress called Shadia. She was very famous in the Arab world in the 1950s and 60s especially. When I lived in Scotland as a child the only way for me to keep in touch with the image of Egypt (where I was born) was through watching my aunt’s films on VHS; my grandmother used to record them for me when they would air on television. I would sit miming the words wishing I could be transported from the bitter isolation of my Glaswegian childhood into the moving images. Later I was to live in Saudi Arabia, a place where most moving images were banned at the time, and so I retreated into music — I trained myself to sing by listening to the same cassette tape over and again, stop starting, attempting to understand each vocal technique.

My time in the shower ends up lasting for 45 minutes. I practice 6 of my standards: At Last (Etta is an idol), Out Here On My Own (FAME!), Everybody Here Wants You (Buckley’s dying words…), I Will Always Love You (the Parton variety), Endless Love (the Duet), Crying (K.D. Lang version), followed by 3 attempts at Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren.

I realise I am late to meet an artist arriving from Los Angeles.

I pull out an un-ironed shirt from my closet and jump into the maroon trousers I have worn to work for the last two weeks.

I know I should avoid ubers, but I have no choice, plus it will give me a chance to dig for productivity tips in Musk’s biography.

CUT TO:

Laptop studio visit: I am with Zach Blas and we are discussing the development of Contra-Internet since he first coined the term in a book that we produced together. We mull over strategies of resistance and discuss the disenchantment that engulfed by native country since 2011. We discuss my grandfather, an activist who passed away following a stroke suffered in Tahrir Square.

We carry on: drinking coffee and beer simultaneously. We are double fisting, fighting Zach’s jet lag and my own restless neurosis, which emerge as a response to the day’s tasks ahead.

JUMP TO:

Bus stop.

I am green. Green. Green. Ecologically free.

I am back in my email account and I have just received another LinkedIN request. I decide this is the time. Time for the monthly check-in! I log in and wade through over a 100 professional contacts who want to ‘connect’. Some are students, some artists (shall I trust an artist who has a Linkedin profile? Jeff Koons seems to have one), but mostly it is design and communications firms looking for business. I shut down. And finish off Musk’s biography.

INT. OFFICE — AFTERNOON

I go through my curator mail (the physical kind) before heading down to the galleries to install two exhibitions. The artist for one of the shows has refused to respond to my Skype or emails and so I am installing her work through my own scenographic design, taking initiative. That’s what curators do. They tell stories, I tell myself. She won’t be able to challenge me on arrival. No sir-e, bob! It would cost too much; too much time. We are all too time poor.

Next door, my colleagues are installing a salon hang: 40 paintings from the turn of the twentieth century. I spend an hour and fifteen minutes instructing: higher; centred; left-right; left-right. Please. Thank you. Please, thank you. Please, thank you. Please, thank you.

Another uber becomes urgent. I have a meeting on the other side of town in 15 minutes –at a flea market. I’m working on a commission between an artist and scientist and we need to gather materials. I am mystified as to why Portobello market will hold the treasures required, but I haven’t been there in a while and so I pursue this task with moderate enthusiasm.

As the artist-scientist duo talk to each other in rhythmic tongues I begin foraging through ‘vintage’ vinyl record. Vintage here is denoted by the upended price tag. I am John Cusack in High Fidelity I tell myself. I have been taken over by Retromania. I walk out with 6 records. We complete our conversation consuming frozen yogurt at Frae despite my lactose intolerance, I then chase this with two green teas.

EXT. Outside Restaurant — Early Evening

I am waiting for a patron who is visiting from one of the so-called Levantine states outside of an Indian restaurant near Shoreditch High Street. It is a chain, as much as this place likes to think of itself as a boutique kind of outfit. 20 minutes pass. I refuse to go inside: my body fidgets involuntarily when too many people surround me, and I am without someone to make eye contact with. I check my emails. Fuck! I am in the wrong location –had the patron been more patronly he would have chosen a locale that was unique, one of kind, non-confusable!

The patron will call in for the night. The chance to raise funds for my next project will have to wait for another day.

I call two friends, ‘creative types’ who spend their days and nights tap, tap, tapping away at keyboards in Shoreditch’s only private members club. Before long I am summoned upstairs where they lay on their laptops drinking sparkling wines on sun loungers on the pool (despite the fact that the sun has all but nearly set and an autumnal chill has made its way across our bodies).

‘I just did the most amazing Skype Studio this morning!’ one of my friends tells me.

‘He was an artist who worked with bio-metrics whose work was actually aesthetic!”

I turn down and peer at my phone, open iCAL. I still have two essays to complete by Monday: two artists who are exceptionally different. Both male. One Anglo; one Semitic. Both hot. Both straight. Both married, one with kids. Could these biographical notes offer an entry point into my narrativization of their artistic practices?

I elide the hipster swarm and East London’s ever-ending commoditization. As I scurry to the Overground I become focused on the Boxpark construction that has emerged as a skeletal body enrapturing the train station. Thick black shipping containers are lined up: a modular system, various loads and volumes cater to different brands: fair-trade coffee, American backpacking gear, GAP, gourmet Falafel, #BEDHEADHAIRSPACE, #IMARNINAILS, #JUSTHYPE, etc!

Could these containers be an allegory? A cabinet of endless commoditised curiosities? Are they the cavernous portals of the mind: each containing a different desire?

INT — HOME –EVENING

When I get home I feel confronted by my own mortality: all the books that I will never read; all the books I will never write. All the films I will never experience. I wish I was Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive –I would rub my fingers against the edges of my books, gently caressing each page and with this gesture I would ingest its contents. My eyes: one of the reminders of my corporeal shell shall not be perturbed.

How can one find a container for such voluminous desires of consumption?

If architectures function as containers of our memories: we must find vessels to hold them (to keep them alive as our environments continue to outgrow themselves).

I throw up. Three times.

It comes out thick and fast: like Baba Ghanoush.

This is adrenaline and sleep deprivation –an enmeshed set of physical forms; my body is backing up.

There is nothing to stop me.

I throw up again.

I try and surrender to self-help.

A close friend gave me a book by Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: “From the author of the internationally bestselling author of HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE.” It looks like an out-dated romance novel. Cut-rate design. But I need to stop suffering. I remember, my father, whose hobby was to psychoanalyse me would say: you are addicted to suffering that is why you do what you do. In this art world of yours there are far too many tortured people. That is not good. Remember: Your suffering is only relative to those suffering around you.

Part One in a Nutshell

By Dale Carnegie

If you want to avoid worry, do what Sir William Osler did.

Who was Sir William Osler? What about 50 Cent, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Pink: how did they do it all? I wish I could be comfortable (not at the expense of others?)

A coffee shot.

A green book sits before me: The Liturgy of Nichiren Buddhism.

I flip it open:

Myo jo ren ge kyo

Hoben-pon. Dai ni.

Niji seson. Ju Sanmai. Anjo.

I remind myself that I am against the act of prayer.

I check my emails. I had asked a colleague if she wouldn’t mind attending a meeting on my behalf on Monday morning. Her response: ‘I am not your assistant or your PA (same difference, douche bag!). I wish I could help but then I don’t have anyone to help me and it is not fair that I help you when I have no one to help me, maybe if you could get someone to help me, then I could help you more with things like attending meetings on your behalf. Have a great rest of Saturday/Sunday.’

I take my laptop into bed. This is the domesticated home for my machine: our symbiosis.

My hands ache. I have developed a severe case of RSI. This is a body without organs. Brain without body/body withOUT a brain.

I am constantly being data mined.

Made subject and instrument of Soft power.

I escape my commitments in Amazon TV. I binge watch How to Get Away with Murder. I am Viola Davis. I am Sasha Fierce.

I am not the thing but the thing that gets you to the thing.

Time for Songs for Sleeping: I want to start a movement around sleep.

Authored: 2015 (re-print from an un-published volume).

Beyoncé, I am Sasha Fierce. Copyright the artist.

)

Dr. Omar Kholeif is a writer, curator, editor, and broadcaster. Views are my own. www.omarkholeif.com

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