The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  People will get to know each other eventually. And there’s something really nice about the time when people are starting to do these games together and the only thing they know about each other is, That’s the person with the red hair who likes to make deep, guttural noises. It’s like an innocence, almost, and like any innocence, it’s sort of fragile and fleeting. I don’t see what’s really gained by knowing on the first day that a person works at a web design company or what their name is. It’s kind of exciting for a little while not to have that information.

  These classes are a really interesting way to get to know people. You see stuff about them that’s so intimate, and you’re doing something very unusual together, so there’s a real bond. This bond isn’t about having the kind of information that adults usually have about each other. It’s about a shared experience. And you do get information about people, but just not the usual kind. You learn about how they use their bodies and how they use their voices, the times when they’re bossy and the times when they’re not. You get so much of that sort of thing so fast.

  Something that’s happened more than once in my classes is that at a certain point, maybe midway through a series, we’ll be talking about some exercise or whatever, and one of the students will be talking, and I’ll think, Why are they talking in that weird voice? Then I’ll realize they’re talking in their normal voice—it’s just that I haven’t heard it before. This is a person I’ve spent a few weeks watching and working with and thinking about, who I feel I know really well. But it turns out I don’t actually know what their voice sounds like because I’ve never heard them speak.

  55. Making the City More Fun for You and Your Privileged Friends Isn’t a Super-Noble Political Goal

  There are a lot of people out there who advocate a specific kind of civic improvement. They’re interested in a kind of transformation of public space, and there’s a cluster of causes that go together: less corporate advertising; more cycling and walking and less car use; outdoor events and street parties and bringing art to public places. There’s a lot about this kind of work that’s genuinely laudable, but what the city will end up looking like if such people achieve their goals is one that’s uniquely and specifically well suited to people who are young and well educated and able-bodied, with a fair amount of free time, who are interested in culture and parties and living in a dense downtown core. In other words, people just like themselves.

  Now, I mean, these goals, they’re pretty well aligned with what I would like to see in a city. And they also happen to be preferences for things that are broadly pretty good. For instance, it probably is a good thing for people to be less reliant on cars. At the same time, it’s easy to be opposed to cars when you and all your friends share a lifestyle built around walking and biking—for reasons that aren’t actually environmental in origin.

  I don’t think it’s terrible for people to push for their own self-interests in the design of a city, or to push for the interests and preferences of the groups to which they belong, but it’s useful to have some recognition that this is what you’re doing. The “more beautiful” city these people are picturing—with lots of posters for bands and garage sales stapled everywhere, which is permissive of graffiti, with street performers on every corner—this might be more beautiful to them. But I think, for instance, of my grandmother, a strongly opinionated woman who was born in a shtetl and had a fifth-grade education and whose husband worked in a garment factory. I think she would have hated to live in a city like that. Her image of beauty in a city would involve a lot more order and control and quiet, and it wouldn’t be negatively impacted by some billboards depicting attractive models enjoying luxury products.

  What I want is a lot closer to what these particular sorts of activists want than what my grandmother wants. But it’s not fair, in the context of city planning, to pretend that the word beauty applies only to my image of beauty and not somebody else’s.

  You need to be smart to avoid the pitfalls of this sort of activism. I know some people who are pretty smart about it, but if you’re not careful, you end up being part of this long and unadmirable tradition of educated, cultured people who want to promote everything that’s good and uplifting, and cleanse the city of everything that’s bad for it. And it just happens that the things that are good for the city are the things that members of the educated, cultured class happen to enjoy, and the things that are bad for it are the things they don’t.

  There’s something in this mentality that feels like it’s about trying to protect the city from itself—trying to protect it from commerce. All this agitation against advertising in public places in the city—I mean, a city is an inherently commercial place. What creates a city is people coming together to do trade with each other. It’s fundamentally a place of commerce. So to object that advertising is impinging on our public space is really to take an imaginary and high-minded understanding of what a city is and what a city is for.

  56. Seeing John Zorn Play Cobra

  I saw John Zorn play Cobra when I was a student. It must have been when he was first starting to perform it. There are these people onstage juxtaposing all these discordant noises and snippets of music, and they’re all making hand signals at each other and waving cards with cryptic symbols on them. Then someone puts on a hat and someone takes off a hat. It was all pretty crazy and baffling to watch.

  They did the performance, and then at the end of the performance they had time for questions. So I asked what seemed to be the only reasonable question to ask, which is, How does this game work? John Zorn seemed pretty emphatically to think that was a dumb question. He said something like, I don’t want to explain how this game works. I don’t think that’s the point. This is a piece of music, and if I had my way, we’d be playing it behind a screen and the audience would just be listening to it.

  I think I said, Well, I think it would be more fun for the audience and more interesting if we knew what was going on. He didn’t take well to that.

  Naturally, if he really wanted to play the game behind a screen, he could. People have played the game all over the world for twenty-five years, and, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever played it behind a screen. So the performance of this game, by design, always involves a bunch of people onstage doing something very complicated and very intriguing that’s completely incomprehensible to the audience, then curiously making the statement that the audience shouldn’t be intrigued.

  * * *

  A long time later, I was running a games night. The idea was that I’d get people into a bar and have them play different games together—they would play Jenga or charades. Then I got the idea to play Cobra. I was still really interested in undoing that crazy obfuscation that was in the John Zorn performance. There was something in it that seemed wrong to me—the idea of a bunch of performers onstage sharing this inaccessible inside joke among themselves, which the audience is somehow challenged to not care about or something.

  The rules of Cobra are secret to some degree. John Zorn has always insisted that they not be published anywhere, so they’re passed on orally from musician to musician, all of whom promise to keep that code of confidentiality. At the time, there was a bit of a Cobra scene in Toronto, run by a musician named Joe Sorbara, and when I approached Joe about wanting to run a game of open Cobra, he was initially reluctant. But eventually I think he figured that my Cobra would be sufficiently helpful to the cause of improvised music and didn’t constitute too much of a violation of John Zorn’s requirements, since we wouldn’t actually be publishing the rules.

  The show worked like this: First Joe’s band came on and played Cobra the way it’s normally played, in all its noisy, inaccessible mystery. I had written a really simple computer program which was called the Cobratron, which was something between a scoreboard and a series of educational flash cards that we projected above the stage, so the band could play demonstration rounds of Cobra, while the Cobratron gave a live play-by-play of what was happening, explain
ing the game. Then we took a short intermission and I said to people, Come back and we’ll make some sounds together for a few minutes, and if you like that, you can stick around and learn Cobra. I also said, If you don’t like it, which is a really, really normal response, then you can leave, and that’s okay.

  After the break, about three-quarters of the people returned, and I had them do some noise exercises. Then a few more people left, but the vast majority stayed. It was exciting, since this was a self-selected group of people who all knew that this was something they liked. It was also a room of people who had only discovered two minutes ago that this was something they liked.

  Cobra is an insanely complicated game, and I wanted to create as much proficiency as quickly as possible. A lot of the training was done in small groups—so we had a whole barroom of people gathered in small clusters, simultaneously booing and hissing and barking. It was real chaos, real cacophony, but by the end of the evening, they were playing Cobra, and they were thrilled to be watching each other, and sort of applauding wildly.

  While the game had at first seemed completely opaque and inaccessible and like uninteresting noise, people started to find beauty in these previously cacophonous sounds, and they began developing aesthetic preferences, and they started to find that some sets of cacophonous sounds were more beautiful to them than others. As I’d guessed twenty years ago, the game was a lot more interesting to the audience once they had some insight into what was going on.

  57. Impostor Syndrome

  There’s this phenomenon called “impostor syndrome,” and it describes situations in which accomplished people who have admirable jobs or high positions feel like they’re impostors—that they’re fakes—and worry that someone will discover that they’re not really qualified to do this thing. I think it’s natural for people to feel this way, and smart, accomplished people often do feel insecure. But it often gets talked about as a sort of psychological problem that people have.

  One possibility I think people often overlook is that there might be people who feel this way because they are impostors. There actually are people who hold impressive jobs or high positions who don’t merit them.

  It’s normal for us to feel insecure about our own real abilities or accomplishments, but it’s also the case that we’re kind of encouraged to lie about our abilities and successes. There is so much pressure on people to achieve, to become ever more accomplished and impressive, and that goes along with this encouragement to be a kind of salesman of yourself in a certain way. So what ends up happening is that a lot of people really are presenting a version of themselves that is false. In this case, the reason they have this unpleasant feeling of being an impostor is because they are one.

  The solution to impostor syndrome may not be in getting people to accept that they really are who they say they are, but rather to stop pressuring people into lying so much.

  58. Nimbyism

  Our Residents’ Association continues to try to control the number of new bars in our neighborhood, and so we get called Nimbys a lot—which, for those who don’t know, is a disparaging term that stands for Not In My Back Yard. It refers to neighborhood groups who stop things from happening.

  It always seems strange to me that the word is derogatory, because it’s great and important for people to be concerned about what happens in their neighborhood. It’s not as if a general problem in our society is that we suffer from an excess of civic engagement. In Toronto, for instance, interesting neighborhoods get overrun with bar monocultures precisely because residents don’t feel a kind of neighborhood pride or ownership, or don’t have strong enough communities to be able to really take charge in the places they live. And I think that’s a real problem.

  So it doesn’t seem at all bad for people to stand up and say, Not In My Back Yard—for people to want to take charge of what happens around them. It does seem bad to have laws and institutions in place that let the evolution of a neighborhood be determined entirely by the interests of businesses and not at all by the interests of people who actually live there.

  At the same time, I’m aware, even in my own case, of the dangers of this kind of activism. You don’t want a city, for instance, that has no nightlife in it at all, even though someone who lives beside a newly opened bar might prefer that it didn’t exist. And of course, the much more serious issues about which the Nimby term typically gets used—like for people who don’t want a homeless shelter nearby, or a halfway house, or people different from themselves—make it clear that it’s important to limit the amount of say that people have in what happens in their neighborhoods, too.

  The best results happen from balancing different people’s desires. You can’t villainize people for wanting to have some say in what happens in their own neighborhood, but neither can you expect that everything that happens in your neighborhood is up to you to decide.

  59. Conducting from the Center of a Circle

  You get the whole group into a circle. Then you put one person in the center of the circle. The idea is that they close their eyes, which in most of these games sort of indicates that they’re the audience, and they conduct the whole ensemble by moving around. So they’re both the audience and the conductor at the same time, which is a combination I really like. Because their eyes are closed, they’re in less of an authoritative role than the conductor is in some of the other games. I encourage them to lose themselves in it a bit. I’ll often spin them around a little bit and rearrange the members of the ensemble to discourage the person from having too much of a sense of what’s going on. The person in the middle can do whatever they want to evoke or alter sounds from the ensemble. I encourage them to think about timbre, about how they can affect the kinds of sounds that people make. People tend to use their bodies in really interesting ways in this exercise. Because they’re in the center of a circle and because they can’t see what they’re doing, the connection between gestures and sounds is a little bit looser in some ways. Also, because they’re listening with their eyes closed as they’re doing this, they’re responding to the sounds as they do this—which is to say, dancing. It seems to me that that’s sort of the difference; conducting is when you make movements to alter a sound, and dancing is when you make movements in response to a sound. Part of what’s nice about this game is that you’re doing a bit of both simultaneously. It’s a pretty wonderful experience, I think, for the people playing it.

  It’s especially exciting if the conductor can forget, even a little bit, what’s going on—can forget that people they know are responding to their gestures—and lose themselves in the more abstract experience of a soundscape responding to their movements.

  60. Why Noise Music?

  A hundred and fifty years ago, if you wanted to hear music in the house, you taught your daughter to play the piano. It made sense to teach your daughter to play the piano, because it was the only way you could hear piano music on a regular basis. It really solved a practical problem. But now learning to play an instrument is like churning your own butter or something. It’s not actually a necessary or efficient way of getting music into your world.

  The music made by people in my classes ends up being atonal, experimental noise music, not so much because I’m so interested in atonal, experimental noise music, but because I want to give people a chance to enjoy making sounds together. Yet I don’t want it to feel like I’m teaching people to churn their own butter. I feel like if you learn to play “good” music on an instrument, you can’t escape the amateurism trap, where you’re imitating the professionals, and playing the sort of stuff you hear on the radio, but worse. But most people have no preconception of what noise music is supposed to sound like, so when you just make noise music, you’re released from that kind of baggage. You’re not trying to imitate a professional out there doing the “real” thing better than you.

  61. Absenteeism

  I think that for a lot of people my class is the most fun they will have all week, if not all year. But the expe
rience of anticipating one of these classes somehow isn’t fun. I think what most people feel immediately before the class is trepidation. I think that’s true even for the sixth class of an eight-week series, and you’d think they would have learned or gotten used to it. But there’s no getting around it. It’s scary. It’s like getting into the lake when you go swimming. There’s that first moment of getting into the water, and it’s unpleasant. Then you’re swimming and it’s great. But no amount of knowledge about that gets you past the feeling that you might not want to swim.

  This creates a problem with absenteeism. People call and say they’re feeling not quite right for the class today; work was really stressful, or they’re a little under the weather and they’re not quite in the right mood—and I always just tell them to come anyhow. If I can convince them to come to the class, they inevitably overcome their self-diagnosed state of not being in the right mood for it. They have a great time and the class takes them out of the class-inappropriate mood.

  I think it’s important to say that I go through those exact same feelings before I teach the classes. It’s probably my favorite thing in the world to do, but before every single class I secretly hope that no one will show up and it will be canceled.

  62. Failure and Games

  If you’re worried about failure, then it’s very hard to let yourself be surprised. If you’re thinking you shouldn’t fail, then probably you imagine that there’s somewhere in particular you need to be. You’re probably intent on taking a particular path to get there. So if you find yourself somewhere surprising, you might feel the need to go backwards, to get back onto the right path. That means you’ll miss out on a lot of interesting and useful surprises.