“Rabbi Baer of Radoshitz once said to his teacher, the ‘Seer’ of Lublin: ‘Show me one general way to the service of God.’
The zaddik replied: ‘It is impossible to tell men what way they should take. For one way to serve God is through learning, another through prayer, another through fasting, and still another through eating. Everyone should carefully observe what way his heart draws him to, and then choose this way with all his strength.'”
~Martin Buber, The Way of Man
Whenever I am scrolling through Netflix and I see one of their own productions in the “trending now” or “critically acclaimed” sections, I’m like, “Ugh, bragging like that is so unseemly.”
From a Daily Beast article published in 2014:
Marni Kotak sits on a gold-painted twin bed, wearing a gold satin nightgown, with matching bedsheets covering her legs. She’s scribbling in gold ink on a cartoonishly large notepad, an expanding list of the day’s emotional fluctuations. It’s a small room, littered with gold-painted everything: chairs, desk, exercise machine, dumbbells.
It isn’t Kotak’s apartment, but the microscopic Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn, where I have come to see Mad Meds, during which the 39-year-old performance artist will document her “personal struggles with her own mind, the US medical system, and the pharmaceutical industry as she attempts to withdraw from psychiatric medicines.”
Kotak has only just begun weaning herself off a cocktail of anti-psychotic, anti-depressant, and anti-anxiety medication. She started the pill-popping regimen—a combination of Wellbutrin, Abilify, Klonopin—in February 2012 after being treated for postpartum depression. A medicine cabinet stuffed with empty pill bottles provides an informal tally of the drugs she’s consumed in the past two years. When I arrive, Kotak is surprisingly relaxed, telling me that, at the moment, she’s only suffering from “mild anxiety and achiness.”
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This woman is a genius. The birth of the child which kicked off the postpartum was also staged as a “performance,” although that choice I find a bit less exciting. Anyway, I’m a Marniphile now.
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