The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  Usually in my noise classes I prohibit rhythm and melody and harmony, and I do that because in that particular exercise I specifically want to investigate what’s possible without those things. Of course that doesn’t mean I’m universally against those things—it just happens to be that I’m investigating something specific. I have to be strict because if I’m not, the investigation collapses. The purposes are local.

  Like, if you write a book that takes place in Paris, it’s not a statement that no book should ever take place in New York.

  49. Get Louder or Quit

  Lots of improvisations tend to end with a slow fading out, which I find really boring. I’m very interested in finding other types of simple endings. One instruction I really like for ending a piece is, Get louder or quit. This works especially well in a large group and the instruction is this:

  Every few seconds, every member of the ensemble should check in on themselves and see how they’re doing, and they can decide to do one of two things. They can drop out of the piece—and if everyone’s standing, they can actually lie down and listen—or they can continue, but if they want to continue, they’re obliged to become louder. Partly I like it because I like how it sounds—the gradual transformation from fifty people making soft sounds to ten people making louder sounds to two people screaming at the top of their lungs. But I also like that it discourages lazy group behavior. It says that it’s okay and even interesting to stand out and go your own way in a piece. As an improviser, when you notice that most other people are becoming silent and dropping out of the piece, the joining inclination tells you that you should do the same thing—you don’t want to be left behind; you don’t want to be the gazelle that strays from the herd and gets killed by a lion. But being a good improviser is also very much about fighting that inclination. It’s nice that while everybody else is quietly ending the piece, some people start yelling louder.

  50. Why Robert McKee Is Wrong About Casablanca

  One day, some friends and I snuck in to see the tail end of Robert McKee’s seminar. Robert McKee is the author of Story, a sort of bible for screenwriters, and thousands of people pay lots of money to take his class. We arrived as he was talking about Casablanca, which is the grand finale of the seminar.

  McKee says that what’s so beautiful about Casablanca is Rick’s great love for the Ingrid Bergman character. At the end, Rick chooses not to be with her, and McKee talks about this as the greatest illustration of the depth of Rick’s love for her: it is so strong that it will live forever in Rick’s heart, despite the tremendous physical distance that has separated them for years, and despite the fact that he now may never see her again.

  I think Robert McKee might be a very bad husband. This seems like the most destructively romantic understanding of love. The idea that love is something magical, almost supernatural, in your heart, that has nothing to do with the day-to-day encounters with a real person—that understanding of love has probably created more unhappiness and ruined more marriages than just about anything.

  Love is what happens between people living their lives together, becoming close through contact and actual partnership, and it’s what survives through difficulties and imperfections. An idealized, imagined, faraway person in your heart—that’s not love. That’s a daydream. People often mistake that daydream for love, so either they’re disappointed when love doesn’t measure up to that daydream, or they try to protect that daydream from being sullied by real life.

  A man like Rick—a man who chooses to be alone for his whole life out of love for a woman he chooses not to be with—isn’t a man who knows anything about love.

  51. Conferences Should Be an Exhilarating Experience

  A big part of the work that I do is running a certain kind of conference that is usually called an “unconference.” It’s a name I don’t like very much, but I think the structure is great. What defines these events is that they’re super-highly participatory and they give the people attending them a tremendous amount of agency and control over what happens. If you’re at one of these conferences, most of the time what’s happening is you’re engaged in conversation with people, and typically those conversations are conversations about the things you care most about, with the other people at the conference who also care most about those things.

  I think that many conferences are organized without much thought given to why it is that people might come to a conference, or at least that’s how they seem if you look at their design. So, for example, it seems to me that the main reason people would want to come to a conference has to do with actually meeting other people who share their interests, so that they can learn from each other or work together on solving problems. But what usually happens at a conference is you go into a room and you’re in a room with fifty people and there’s one person reading from their paper.

  This structure is insanely atavistic! If you want to read this person’s paper, you can read it on the Internet. This structure doesn’t just ignore the existence of the Internet, it ignores the existence of the printing press. It’s a medieval idea about how information should be disseminated—to imagine that if you want to know what someone thinks, you have to go sit in a room with them while they read out loud to you their thoughts. But at a lot of conferences that’s the primary thing that happens.

  Finding out what someone has to say in their paper isn’t a reason to travel across the country and stay in a hotel room. A reason to travel across the country is to have conversations with people and actually form human relationships. Most of the stuff that happens at a conference not only does not help create that, it hinders it. You have all these smart people—say, ninety-nine smart, passionate people—sitting in silence as one person talks. And of those ninety-nine people, eighty of them are bored out of their heads. I think it’s a huge waste of potential, all that intelligence and passion and interest just being switched off. Of course there are times when it’s fun to hear a lecture, and that can be useful, but it really shouldn’t be the only thing that a conference is about.

  * * *

  There’s something called an “open space meeting” and there’s something called an “unconference.” An open space meeting is a super-simple, deeply self-organized structure, and an unconference is an event that typically includes an open space meeting alongside other structures.

  Here’s how an open space meeting works: You have a group of people and you let them write their own agenda. So maybe you’ll have a hundred people coming together for a day and you have five time slots and six rooms for people to meet in. So you make a big, five-by-six-foot grid and you stick it up on the wall, and you say to this group of one hundred people, Okay, who has something they want to talk about or learn about or work on?

  People say what they want to talk about, and you put it on the grid. This doesn’t take very long, and now you’ve got this agenda where you’re guaranteed that for every item on it, there’s at least one person there who really cares about it. One thing I’ll say to people is, If there’s something you really feel needs to be discussed today—if it’s not up there, it’s because you haven’t put it there. It’s not because of the failure of some conference committee; it’s your job to put it there. So you really try to ensure that all the things that people want to talk about are up there. You assign each topic a time slot and a room. Then you let people self-select and go into the rooms where the topics they most care about are being discussed. In any given room, there are any number of people who have chosen that one topic as being the thing they’re most interested in talking about right then. If you’ve decided on that topic and you’re in that room alone, you can think about that topic alone or go join another room. What turns out to be true is that a conference full of smart, passionate delegates can do a lot more and make better choices than a small conference-planning committee can.

  Something else I say to people is that if you propose a topic at an open space meeting and only one person comes to your session, you might think
that it’s a failure, but to my mind it’s this huge success: there’s this one other person at the conference who cares about the thing you most care about, and you guys have found each other.

  By doing all this, you eliminate a bunch of problems. You typically end up with pretty small groups, so almost everybody spends some time talking. You don’t spend months with a conference committee trying to anticipate the desires of a group of people whose needs you ultimately can’t anticipate. It generally works really well, and it also works well with different kinds of groups.

  I did this kind of conference with workers in a very hierarchical health care organization that was experiencing cutbacks. The organization was going through changes that everyone knew were bad for everyone who worked there, and everyone felt discouraged. The goal was to look for ways to make it a better place to work in the face of all these cutbacks. The people at the conference weren’t the managers; they were the frontline workers who took all the crap day-to-day, and who typically felt like they didn’t have a lot of control. These were people who were thought of as incapable of a lot of organizational initiative. A lot of people thought, Well, it won’t work with this group. They’re not initiative-takers. They’re used to being told what to do. But it worked so well. I’ve heard so many times, It won’t work with this group, but it always works. It works well with groups of people who are really smart and really passionate and self-motivated, and maybe a little more surprisingly, it works amazingly with groups of people who are considered—or who consider themselves to be—the opposite of all those things.

  * * *

  When I’m designing an unconference, I’ll spend a long time with the organizers figuring out how to seed conversations in ways that are useful. A really simple thing I’ll do at the beginning of a conference is get people to put themselves into random groups. We used to program the groups, but it turns out it’s better just to tell people, Stand up and find four people you don’t know. Even that one step, something as simple as that—letting people form their groups very early on—really energizes the room differently.

  Then what we’ll do is give them specific topics of conversation. So we did a conference on copyright and art to which we invited artists and open-source software activists and legal experts and academics, most of whom were really opinionated. They were very engaged with the regulatory stuff that’s going on in government, and I think if left to their own devices, the most natural starting point would have been for them to talk about the legal debates at that moment.

  But as a starting point, once they were in random groups, we asked people to describe to each other early experiences that they could remember from their own adolescence, when there was a cultural product that they really, really coveted—a record they really wanted to hear or a book they wanted to read or a show they wanted to see—and we had them share those stories with each other, and it helped a lot, I think. It made people recall why this stuff is important to them. And also, you have someone sitting across the table from you and they hold some opposite position from you about the new bill being debated; eventually you’ll find that out about them. But the starting point I’m more interested in is to hear them talk about that record that they were dying to listen to when they were fourteen years old, and how much that mattered to them, and to understand that everyone is at the conference because they care passionately about art, about culture, and to hear about those formative experiences—to gain the kind of personal intimacy that comes from hearing about those experiences.

  After giving them a question like that, you reshuffle the groups and give them another question, and then you do it again. It takes just about an hour to do three conversations, and you’ve accomplished a huge amount. Every single person at the conference has met a dozen new people, so hundreds of connections have been made. Everybody at the conference has talked—which is unusual for a conference. And if it works well, people will really feel like they know each other, which I think is incredibly important.

  A big problem that happens here in Canada, as in many places, is that we encourage people to immigrate who have professional training in their countries of origin, but when they come here, we don’t let them practice their professions because we don’t recognize their homeland’s training. So we had an idea that a great conference would be one where we get all these people with foreign Ph.D.s who are driving taxicabs, and medical doctors who are working as security guards, and architects who are working as building superintendents—we’d get all those smart people together and have them spend a day thinking about some of the issues of immigration policy in Canada and write up a report.

  We started the conference by asking people to go stand with people who came from the same continent as them. When you do this sort of exercise, you give people really minimal instruction and let them sort it all out themselves. It looked like a stock exchange floor with everybody shouting and waving and signaling at each other—figuring out who goes where. Southeast Asia split off from the rest of Asia; the Caribbean had its own group. Then we had people self-organize by professional training. The room sort of exploded into chaos at that point, and I had to reschedule everything I thought we were going to do, because for a lot of people, this was the first time in ten years that they’d been able to stand with a group of architects and identify as an architect, or stand with a group of doctors and be identified as a doctor. So you have a hundred people, all of whom are releasing years of pent-up frustration. It was really moving. I think we thought those two exercises would take only fifteen minutes, but they took an hour because people had so much to say to each other.

  * * *

  For the discussion part of the conference, I usually don’t give too much instruction, but I have one tip that I’ll give people. It’s my “one over n” rule of conversation. What I tell people is: If you’re in a group of five people, the natural amount of time for you to be talking is about a fifth of the time.

  Whenever you tell people this, they laugh. Because the fact is so obvious, and the problems that arise from the nonrecognition of that fact are obvious, too. I’ll tell people, There’s lots of good reasons to be talking more than that, and lots of good reasons to be talking less than that, and I just kind of advise them: If you are talking much more than that or much less than that, at the very least just stop and ask yourself if you have a good reason. It doesn’t work perfectly: dominant people still dominate sometimes and shy people are often more quiet. But I think giving the groups an awareness of this goal helps a lot.

  * * *

  I think what regularly happens at a conference is that the organizers will spend a lot of time thinking about who the panelists will be, and a lot of time thinking about what will be served for dinner. Lots of time is put into thinking of a theme for that year’s conference, and if there’s any thought at all put into the idea that people should talk to each other, they usually program a cocktail party. But a cocktail party is a terrible way for people to meet each other. If you’re really outgoing, maybe you’ll talk to ten new people, but you’re not going to find the people at the conference you most need to talk to.

  I went to one conference that was made up entirely of lectures and panels, and you had to fend for yourself to find lunch off campus, so when lunch came, which is the time you can talk to people, you weren’t even all in the same place! Then they programmed a cocktail party, but they did the cocktail party as a fund-raiser, and they charged an extra fifty bucks on top of the conference admission fee to attend the fund-raiser. So there was one thing in the whole conference that was actually about getting people to meet each other, and they put a barrier in front of it!

  I think that’s really common, that kind of thinking. People figure that the social stuff will just work itself out.

  52. Improvised Behavior

  I like running improv theater classes but I don’t really like the theater part very much. I like the running-around-behaving-foolishly part, but I’m not really interested in character o
r stories. In music, some people do work that doesn’t involve melody or rhythm or pitch or any of the stuff that’s traditionally characteristic of music. Eventually, with that really abstract stuff, you stop calling it “music” and just call it “sound.” Similarly, in dance—when it starts becoming really undancelike, you just call it “movement.” So I’m doing something that’s like theater but dumber—classes without all the stuff that makes theater theater. I call these classes “improvised behavior.”

  53. Storytelling Is Not the Same Thing as Conversation

  Mostly, I’m always suspicious when someone says, Oh, that person’s such a great conversationalist. They tell the most wonderful stories. First off, being a conversationalist and telling wonderful stories aren’t the same thing. I mean, a story isn’t a conversation. It’s a monologue, a one-way thing. When you’re telling a story, you need to not be interrupted—and the story has to end up where you want it to end up.

  The best conversationalists are people who are hoping to end up somewhere they didn’t expect. I always picture storytellers at home, nervously rehearsing their anecdotes, so that when they get to the party, people will think well of them and be impressed. And that seems awful. It just seems sad to think of people sacrificing the potential pleasure of real conversation in the interest of scoring points.

  It seems to me that the most pleasing thing you can find yourself saying in a conversation is something you haven’t said before.

  54. Introducing People in the Classes

  When a new class begins, instructors often have a strong inclination to get people to go around a circle and introduce themselves, and maybe say why they’re taking that class or what they hope to get out of it. I mostly try to resist this inclination.