The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  Sometimes people are too polite to each other in a scene because no one wants their character to be mean to the other character. Having people dance around doing victory dances while the other person weeps onstage, especially when it’s the weeper who instigated this relationship, is a good way to train people out of that discomfort.

  * * *

  I started doing the argument games as music instruction because I suspected it would be a good way of loosening people up. I was working with a group of people and I wanted them to be making all sorts of interesting, crazy sounds. I wanted them to be using their bodies in interesting ways, and they were having a hard time with all of it. I thought that by having them fight, it might loosen them up a bit. And it did.

  When people improvise musically, you want them to be able to really listen and respond to each other while making sounds at the same time. You want people to understand that it’s sometimes okay to be quiet. You want people to have different ways of responding to their partner: sometimes joining them in what they’re doing, sometimes repeating them, sometimes doing something completely different from what they’re doing. And you want people to feel free to take the piece in a completely different direction.

  It’s really hard to teach people to do this straightforwardly with music, but it turns out that teaching people to do this with arguments takes about twenty minutes. So what I do is I teach people to argue, and then I tell them that a duet is just an argument except without anger, and the sounds you use don’t have to sound like language anymore—they can be anything.

  And very quickly people start to make interesting sounds and especially to make brave choices together, without the caution that usually typifies these things. It makes me very happy. There’s a very pleasant paradox. It turns out that the best way to get people to communicate and collaborate on something beautiful is for them to start with a fight.

  43. What Experimental Music Is For

  It’s a good thing to imagine that in experimental music and other art that uses the term experimental, you might want to take seriously the experimental tag. I think of it as the pure-research wing of a corporation or something like that. Most music aims to produce something of utility—in the sense that economists and philosophers use the word: something that people want, that brings them pleasure. People enjoy listening to this sort of music. They may even be willing to pay money to enjoy it. Experimental stuff, I feel, has a different goal, and it’s just to produce lots of results and lots of new ideas, some of which might lead toward new ways of making that more obviously useful music.

  Like, if you listen to “Work It” by Missy Elliott—that’s pure pop: awesome, awesome, amazing, pure pop. It’s exactly the opposite of the sort of research-and-development branch of the organization that is music. It’s of tremendous immediate value. It makes people get up and dance. And people demonstrate the degree to which they value it by paying money to hear it, in different ways.

  “Work It” is like this insane collage of incredibly abstract electronic noises, some of which would be considered really abrasive in other contexts. At various different moments, the vocal track is played backwards. But a song like “Work It” or any of a gazillion really interesting things happening now in dance music couldn’t have happened without twentieth-century experimental music. It’s as though “Work It” is the useful application of all those useless experiments. “Work It” is like those unbreakable dinner plates that got developed because of the space program.

  44. These Projects Don’t Make Money

  It’s really obvious to some people and not at all obvious to other people that the projects I run don’t make any money at all. When people with real jobs read something about an art exhibition in a newspaper, or see a band interviewed on TV or featured on the cover of a local weekly, it’s natural for them to assume that those people are making money. I mean, they’re doing something that seems really successful. They’re in the paper—you’re not. So surely they must be making money.

  For the past several years I’ve hosted the Trampoline Hall lecture series. When Trampoline Hall was doing really well, a friend of Sheila and her then husband, Carl, came up to them soon after they bought a house and said, Wow, I guess the shows must be doing really well for you to be able to afford this house. At the time, the show really was something of a little phenomenon. But it was a little phenomenon that happened once a month before a crowd of eighty people and charged five dollars at the door. And he wasn’t joking! It’s hard for people sometimes to understand that things that look successful or generate attention don’t necessarily also generate money.

  I feel it would be useful if the audience had a clearer understanding of what the economics really are. I always wanted to do a Trampoline Hall show about money, where part of the show would be to break down the budget of Trampoline Hall and explain to the audience how it came to be, and that we basically lost money doing this nominally successful show.

  It’s very hard to talk about this stuff. People want to appear successful, so they don’t want to talk about how difficult it is to hold down a day job while working on their third album, but it’s a big part of the reality of a lot of kinds of cultural production.

  I’m not complaining. I’m not saying that there’s an injustice here, or that artists need to be paid by society. I just think it’s interesting that artists assume that the people in the audience have some sense of what the economics of their situation are, but in many cases they don’t. I guess it would be great if audiences knew this stuff—if they could have more of a sense of patronage about the art that they enjoy and start to think about supporting the cultural things they like.

  For instance, now, if I see a band that I like, I’ll buy their CD—not because I want their CD at all, but because I understand enough about the economics involved to know that those CD sales are what keeps the band active, and that by buying a CD you’re sort of casting your vote and doing your bit to make that possible.

  It’s tricky, because consumers of indie culture are often, by nature, bargain hunters. They’re people who shop at thrift stores, and often they don’t have much money. Being a bargain hunter and being a patron are sort of incompatible.

  But the truth is, liking a really good band that no one knows about is typically a really good deal: you get to see them in small venues for not a lot of money; they’ll probably answer your fan mail; they’ll talk to you after a show. Seeing a band that everyone likes isn’t much of a bargain. You typically have to pay more money to see them, you receive less attention or affection from them. When you do see them, you have to share that experience with more people, so you effectively get less from them.

  Of course it’s better for the band to be more popular. A bargain for the fan is often a bad deal for the artist. One of the secrets of Trampoline Hall is that people perceive—albeit not really consciously—that they’re getting tremendously good value for their entertainment dollar. So, for five dollars they get a ticket that’s usually handmade and a program at the door. They get to see three lecturers—a show that’s the outcome of huge amounts of work that’s only seen once before an audience of about a hundred people. The curator shakes their hands when they come in. There’s a good chance that the host will acknowledge them individually in the audience. So they get a lot. Usually what makes these indie projects work is that the people who make them have motivations other than money—of course.

  * * *

  When I started getting involved in this kind of work, after years of being a computer consultant, I was continually baffled by just how impossible it was to make any money from all the exciting ideas I had.

  I’m not sure I have gotten over that. It still remains a tremendous puzzle. The answer for me has been to take on a bunch of different projects that play off my interest in getting groups of people to do things together, and in the meantime try to arrange things so that some of what I do pays a lot of money—conferences and events like that. That way, I can offset t
he projects that pay very little money or lose money altogether.

  Maybe that’s okay. It means you have to try to think clearly about the benefits of each particular project; if there’s not going to be money in it, what other benefits might there be? You have to be a bit more aware of why you’re doing these things.

  * * *

  When I worked as a computer programmer, I wasn’t—as computer programmers go—a particularly remarkable one: I didn’t work very hard. I took lots of time off. I tried to only work three or four days a week. But I had tons of money, more money than I knew how to spend—which was great.

  Slowly, as my life got taken over more and more by unprofitable art projects, and as more of my friends became people who were writers and artists, I tried to adapt a bit to my new circumstances, but I still find it hard. The way I live now is pretty extravagant by the standards of a performance artist, but very frugal by the standards of a computer programmer.

  45. Seeing Your Parents Once a Week

  Visit your parents once a week. Agree on the day, and see each other every week on that day. This is what I do. It helps because there are no negotiations about when I should see my parents, and there are no expectations or guilt on either side as a result of this agreement. I see them on Sunday nights, with my girlfriend. Usually they make or buy us dinner, and sometimes they even pick us up and drive us home, so it’s okay.

  46. Asking a Good Question

  At Trampoline Hall, after every lecture, there’s a Q&A with the audience. One of the things that’s really great about the show is that the Q&A’s really work. The audience asks really good questions. I think a big part of the reason they ask really good questions is that at every show, right at the beginning, I talk for a long time about what a good question is.

  The first thing I tell people is that a good question has to be a question. I warn them that if they take a statement and try to raise the pitch of their voices at the end of their sentences, we won’t be tricked. I tell the audience that grammarians will agree that there’s no such thing as a two-part question. I tell people that if they think they have a two-part question, what they really have are two questions, and that they should just pick the better of the two.

  I say that one way to tell if your question is any good is to look inside yourself. I ask the audience to pay attention to what feelings they have when they feel a question coming on. It may seem obvious, but curiosity is a good feeling to have. I say it’s even okay if they feel a little bit angry and want to work that anger out by asking the lecturer something.

  What I warn people against is feelings of pride. I ask them to pay attention to the pictures in their minds when they feel a question coming on, and if they see themselves becoming enormous and floating God-like above the audience, and the lecturer getting smaller and smaller in the distance, then maybe that’s a sign the question isn’t that great. I’m always careful to remind people that their bad questions are welcome; their good questions are just more welcome.

  This speech—and I give it at the start of every Trampoline Hall show—is really long. It’s sort of ridiculous and full of statements that people think are jokes. And they kind of are jokes, but the speech also really works. As much as anything, I think it really helps to let the audience know that they’re expected to ask good questions.

  So our events are not like other events where people go on forever without asking a question, or ask questions that are really off-topic. At Trampoline Hall, Q&A’s are an incredibly pleasurable, enjoyable part of the show.

  47. A Mind Is Not a Terrible Thing to Measure

  There was an editorial in The New York Times by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who I really like as a writer and a thinker, most of the time. The thrust of the article was that there should be no place for measurement in psychology; that when psychology falls into the hands of “scientists,” they somehow ignore everything that is special and unique and mysterious about human beings.

  Although it’s not fair to hold a writer responsible for the title of an article, it was called “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Measure.” Yet that was actually the point of the piece. It was pretty hard-core. The idea was that there’s no place in psychology for empirical study or quantified measurement—as though if you are empirically curious about psychology, it somehow means that you don’t think people have souls.

  Phillips talks about “scientists” and “science,” seemingly invoking these passionless men in white coats with slide rules who are going to measure your head and give you a pill and make you be more normal in society. But science doesn’t have to mean that. I mean, first of all, scientists can care very much about the complexity of people’s minds while also believing that the human mind is a phenomenon in nature, subject to some rules and worthy of empirical study.

  He talks about how the standard of absolute predictability is unrealistic—and of course it is! No one thinks that the mind is absolutely predictable. I mean, the weather isn’t predictable. Does that mean that meteorology isn’t subject to scientific study?

  Mostly what was frustrating, though, was this: I think what’s ultimately meant by science—or should be meant by science—is a genuine curiosity about what’s true and isn’t true, empirically, in the world. So, for instance, it might be true that a good way to get over phobias is by talking a lot about one’s early childhood experience of those fears. Equally, that might not be the case and it might not work. Gradual exposure to the thing you’re afraid of might be a much more effective therapy. A really good way to find that out is by looking at the world, by looking at what happens when people are treated in these different ways, and seeing who actually gets over their phobias. That kind of looking is called science! That’s what that is. That’s all. And that’s so important—to look at the world—to be willing to have your preconceptions or assumptions proven wrong by what the world has to say back to you when you test your assumptions out.

  I think there’s a real intellectual mistake at work here. Of course the human mind is tremendously complicated, and of course there’s something very valuable in an attempt to construct meaning in one’s life and out of one’s experiences, and of course science can’t do those things. But in many cases people go to psychotherapy to fix their problems, and it seems crazy and frankly wildly irresponsible to offer to help people with their problems while willfully and intentionally taking the position that empirical investigation into what solutions work is something you’re emphatically uninterested in.

  Empirically it might well be the case that results-oriented cures for specific psychological problems don’t make things better, that the only answer lies in something more oblique and less solutions-oriented. That might be true. But even that’s an empirical question.

  To Adam Phillips, this may seem very rote and very “scientific” and mechanistic. It may seem like it’s not terribly interesting—which maybe it’s not. It may seem like it ignores a treasure trove of meaning which lies underneath our fears, which maybe it does. But if someone’s life is being held back because air travel is impossible for them, they may want a solution to their problem. That seems fair.

  In the article, he makes a big deal about how each session, each therapy, is unpredictable. Of course any treatment will work in some cases and not in others. But that is also true of all kinds of scientific phenomena, of all kinds of things. If, as a way to help people get over panic attacks, teaching breathing and relaxation exercises works 80 percent of the time, whereas talking about your childhood works 20 percent of the time, those are important facts to know.

  Finally, Adam Phillips makes this comparison between psychotherapy and art. His belief is that science has real goals, whereas what art does is sort of shake things up, and it might make things better, and it might make things worse. It can’t really make any promises. He thinks psychotherapy is like that.

  Now, I agree with that about art, and I think there’s a place in the world for things that shake things up in that kind of
way, and that have uncertain outcomes. I think art should be like that. Psychotherapy probably shouldn’t.

  I can see why someone might want to go to a psychotherapist whose intention is to shake things up with uncertain outcomes—and have the therapy sessions be in that way like an art experience—but if you are the person offering that psychotherapy, I feel it’s dishonest to not tell people, Well, there’s a guy down the block who says he can actually fix your problems. And it’s willful blindness to deny the possibility that that guy down the block might actually be able to do so.

  Much of what Adam Phillips believes is that you have to accept uncertainty, that you can’t know everything, which is something I tend to agree with. But you don’t have to accept more uncertainty than you have to. The fact that you can’t know everything doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to know anything.

  48. Doing One Thing Doesn’t Mean You’re Against Something Else

  When we do Trampoline Hall, we put amateur speakers onstage. People sometimes ask us why we are opposed to experts, but we are not opposed to experts. There’s this terrible idea that the things you do are like this manifesto against everything else.

  For instance, a few years ago, I was attending a conference about improvised music—specifically the difficult, experimental kind. One session at this conference was about whether it was okay to have melody and harmony and rhythm in improvised music. The people on the panel wanted to argue that it was. They perceived that there was a taboo against this, and they wanted to say that a truly improvised music—a music that was truly free—would allow for these things, because it should allow for anything. The whole question just seemed to me to be completely crazy. Music is not in the imperative mode. A piece of music isn’t a universal command that dictates that all music should be like itself.