The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  It’s good to learn to suspend the fear of failure. Game structures can be very useful for that, because failure is built into games. If you’re playing baseball and you swing at the ball and you don’t hit the ball, you understand that’s part of the game. It wouldn’t be a very good game if you always hit the ball. What mostly happens is you swing at the ball and you don’t hit. Does that mean that playing baseball is a miserable experience because you’re mostly failing? If you miss the ball playing baseball, it doesn’t mean you’re playing baseball wrong. It just means you’re playing baseball.

  63. Why a Computer Only Lasts Three Years

  People complain about how in our modern world things aren’t built to last. So when you buy a phone, for instance, it breaks after two or three years and you have to buy another one, and the same with a computer, whereas it used to be that you could buy a typewriter or a telephone and it lasted for decades.

  I see this as a pretty benign consequence of progress. The typewriter that lasted for fifty years wasn’t built in a world where the machines we type on become a hundred times more powerful every three years. Would it really be so awesome if the DOS-based 8086 IBM PC that you bought in 1983 still functioned today? Presumably it would have cost twice as much to make that machine last that long. Now, for less than a week’s salary for the average person, you can buy a machine that can access all the information in the world while copying a movie and storing more text than is contained in a floor of a university library. So you can buy this machine that does all these incredible things, knowing that in three years a machine will come along that does all those things and more, even more incredibly.

  This built-in obsolescence doesn’t come out of malevolence. It comes out of the breakneck speed of progress. We get so insanely much for our money. These machines are such incredibly great deals. And the return on the money accelerates so fast. There’s no sense in the manufacturer spending extra money to make this year’s machine durable enough to compete with the machines that will be around in three years.

  64. What Are These Classes For?

  When I run events and teach classes, I generally pretty much avoid talking about what I imagine they might be for. With my music classes, for instance, I want to imagine that they can be very different things for different people. So I know why I like to do them, but a lot of those reasons aren’t transferable to the people in my classes, because these reasons have to do with my experience of leading the class, not their experience of taking the class. People are sometimes interested in thinking about the classes as being for specific purposes—that the classes will help them be more confident or flexible in some situations, or that they’ll learn something about music or theater, or that the classes will help them relax or be more creative.

  It’s really important to me that my classes aren’t meant to bring about some specific result. I guess in some real way this means they’re not actually classes, even though in many ways they resemble classes.

  With my music classes, what I mostly want is for them to be a musical experience for people. I want them to have functions similar to music. If people ask what the classes are for, well, they’re for whatever music is for. When a person makes a record, it might be the case that someone likes to put on that record after work to help them relax, but that doesn’t mean that that’s what the record is—an after-work relaxing machine.

  One of the most flattering responses a student had to one of my early music classes—and flattering only maybe to me—was that he missed one week and came back the week after. I asked why he wasn’t there, and he said he hadn’t been feeling great that week. One thing that I happen to know about these classes is that a lot of the time if you come to the class when you don’t feel like it, you find that you get really into it, and that it cheers you up and takes you out of that bad mood or whatever. I described that to him, and started explaining that to him, and he interrupted me and he said, Yeah yeah yeah, I understood that if I came to the class it would probably fix my bad mood, but I didn’t want to start thinking about the class as a sort of therapy that I used to raise my spirits.

  This is almost puritanical, I guess, but it really pleased me—the idea that he thought it would trivialize the class to think of it as a sort of therapy.

  65. Who Are Your Friends?

  Teaching my classes, I started to notice during the breaks that there was so much warmth between these people who often had very little in common. They had engaged in a fairly passionate and intimate kind of play with each other, and the connections between them happened so quickly, and they developed such a collective fondness for each other. But this fondness lacked the traits we normally associate with adult friendship. They didn’t know that much about each other. They didn’t know what was going on in each other’s lives. But they felt a strong and genuine closeness. They were happy to see each other. And I started to think, Oh—friends are the people you play with. That seemed like a pretty good definition of friendship to me, and I was satisfied with it.

  Then, about five years ago, a friend of mine moved here from Kelowna, British Columbia. She said, You know, in Toronto, friendships are all based around talking. What you do with your friends is you go out for coffee or drinks, or you go to their apartment and you talk about stuff. In Kelowna, what you do with your friends is go swimming. It seemed really beautiful to me that in Kelowna your friends might just be these people who liked floating around in the water with you—that the people floating near you are your friends.

  66. Neighborhoods Change

  Neighborhoods, inevitably, change. Sometimes they change in ways you don’t like. You might be sad, for instance, to see the old Italian working-class neighborhood you live in get taken over by yuppies that work at ad agencies, but there’s no law against that. No one should have the right to choose who their neighbors are. But people do have the right—to some limited degree—to say what kinds of businesses can operate in their neighborhood, and what kinds of buildings can be built.

  I may be upset, for instance, that my neighborhood has become a place where lots of trendy souvenir shops are opening, but I don’t think for a moment that I should have the right to stop trendy souvenir shops from opening, just because I happen to dislike them. I dislike having nightclubs nearby, too, but I think nightclubs are different: I think people do have the right to regulate nightclubs in their neighborhood. It’s not like I think nightclubs aren’t good or important. They are. They’re something a city really needs to have. But a nightclub next to a home is in the business of selling off other people’s peace and quiet. Not every kind of business is allowed everywhere. In most places, there are laws that prohibit you from operating, say, a slaughterhouse or an iron-smelting plant on a residential street. I think a nightclub is like that. Having a nightclub next door makes an apartment effectively unusable.

  It’s really important to distinguish the things you might not like in a neighborhood from the things over which you oughtn’t to have control. It’s important to make these distinctions, because limits on our control are kind of fundamental to democracy. So a lot of people might not want to have a gay bookstore nearby, or a lot of people might be dismayed to find more members of ethnic minorities moving into their neighborhood, or, for that matter, rich hipsters. But in those cases, your neighborhood preferences lose against the general principles of freedom. As much as I may hate the cute gift store or annoyingly trendy dinner restaurant on my block, I recognize that it’s important that I not have the right to oppose them.

  67. Atheism and Ritual

  A lot of the society around us is becoming more secular and less religious, and I think that’s a great thing. I mean, mostly, I think it’s really good that we not believe in superstitious falsehoods. But it seems to me that there’s a good chance that there’s something about people that makes us really need a lot of that stuff. So one answer is that we continue to believe in superstitious falsehoods because there’s something about us that makes us need them, and
another is that we sort of demand of ourselves to get over superstitious falsehoods and stop believing them.

  I guess what I sort of want to imagine is that there might be some way to refuse to believe things that aren’t true, while also respecting that part of what it means to be a human is to need some of the things that often go along with those beliefs. I guess I’m thinking of things like once-useful rituals that have become meaningless, or a sense of the sacred that we no longer experience, or something like that.

  I think it’s hard to figure out how to have those things in our lives without a sort of crazy false belief at the center of them, but I have a hope that it might be possible. Still, to move in that direction, you have to accept that humans aren’t just these hyperrational thinking machines that have been making an analytic mistake all these centuries. You have to see us more as these beings who really do crave some sort of connection to something mysterious and bigger than ourselves, and you have to understand this craving as something real, and possibly important, that you can’t just reason out of existence.

  Some people do meditation without an attachment to any particular religious tradition—that feels connected to what I’m thinking of. It feels funny to say it, but I think I have some of these issues in mind when I teach the music classes. People come to a space and they do something very different from their day-to-day life that has a component of ritual, that can make them feel like they’re connected to something that’s sort of magic, but without having to actually believe that the rules of science are being suspended.

  Sometimes people in my classes do want to take more literally spiritual interpretations of what’s going on—like that they’re in touch with something genuinely magical in the universe. What’s specifically interesting to me is the possibility of having that feeling of things being somehow magical, and respecting that feeling as something really important and interesting and exciting, without having to imagine there’s anything going on that’s literally magical in the sense of being supernatural.

  It broadly excites me to think that people might get better at finding things like this in the secular world; that in the future people might be able to engage this side of themselves that wants to lose themselves in a way, but without having to abandon an attachment to the truth to do it.

  68. Social Capital

  A lot of people I know who work in the arts think they’re poor. And it’s true that some of them might not have much money, but the idea that they are somehow “the poor” is, I think, an idea too ridiculous to even merit serious consideration.

  69. Sitting Down and Listening as a Role

  In many of the games I do, one role a person can take is to be the person sitting with their eyes closed and listening. I don’t do this in every game, but in some. At some level, it seems important to indicate that people listening are part of the process. I’m closing a kind of loop; the game remains a social thing among the people who are present, and is not a rehearsal for some imagined future audience. Many of the games that I do are kind of theatrical. They involve a lot of moving around and interacting, and that can be fun to watch. Making people periodically stop and just listen serves to remind them to think about the sound output, to understand that at some level all that running around and theater is a means to an end—the end of sound.

  Here is a basic listening game:

  If it’s a class of ten people, I’ll ask four people to volunteer to sit down with their eyes closed in different parts of the room. Then I’ll ask another four to choose to be sound-makers. The remaining two people are spectators. It’s a funny distinction—between listener and spectator—but it feels like an important one to me. The ones sitting on the floor with their eyes closed—even though they’re not doing anything other than listening—I somehow want them to be understood to be part of the piece, while the two people sitting on the couch and listening are not.

  Then I’ll ask the four sound-makers to start making sounds. Often I’ll start this game after we’ve been doing some argument games, so the sounds they make are abstract and argument-like. The four sound-makers start having sound dialogues with each other, and while they’re engaged in that sort of theatrical activity, moving around the room, the listeners are primarily just having a sound experience. The piece, of course, sounds completely different to each listener, which is something I really like, and the sound-makers quickly understand the listeners as an element to be played with—whispering in people’s ears or sneaking up on them and making loud noises.

  Then you shuffle the roles and play again. People keep experiencing the game from different perspectives: sometimes watching it from the outside as a spectator, sometimes hearing it only as sound, sometimes participating in it. I think people get a greater insight into the game by being shuffled through those different roles.

  70. Everyone’s Favorite Thing and Unfavorite Thing Are Different

  Over the course of an eight-week class we’ll do maybe fifteen different games and exercises, and I’ll sometimes check in with people halfway through or toward the end of the classes to see what people have liked, and it’s always really surprising. There will be some particular person who I thought really hated some particular exercise, and then their complaint will be that we didn’t play it long enough.

  Usually what I find is that, if the class is any good, pretty much everything we do will be at least one person’s favorite thing and one person’s least favorite thing. I think this is really useful to understand as a teacher or an organizer of things like this. It’s easy to get caught up in imagining that the whole group really loved something, or really didn’t like something, and to worry about it, too.

  It’s both reassuring and frustrating to understand that, whatever you do, some people are going to like it and some people won’t.

  It can be useful for the students in the class to know this, too. If there’s some exercise they’re really disliking, they’ll experience it differently if they understand that somebody else in the class is probably really enjoying it.

  71. Finding an Ending

  When I have people doing improvisations together, I’ll often have some signal that means they should find an ending. I’ll ring a bell or sometimes I’ll throw something at them. At first, people will just stop playing when I do that. Then I’ll say, No, no, you can keep playing—you just have to end it. Then what they’ll do is keep playing, but maybe a little less. Eventually they get the idea of what it means to find an ending, and what happens pretty quickly is that people get better at it; people begin to take more responsibility for what’s happening in the piece. They let things go in some sudden, brief new direction. They play as if the next bit really matters. They take additional risks, and are somehow freer than they were before. I wish I could find a way to get people to always be engaging with that intensity and that degree of intention. It turns out that telling people, Find an ending, is like saying, Play a little bit better for a while, and then stop.

  72. Wearing a Suit All the Time Is a Good Way to Quit Smoking

  I used to smoke a lot. I smoked more than anybody, I think—like, two and a half packs of cigarettes a day, and in Canada, there are twenty-five cigarettes in a pack, so I was smoking over sixty cigarettes a day. I was always smoking.

  Sometimes, I would be at a party and find myself reaching for a cigarette to light, only to realize I was already smoking one. And of course, smoking two cigarettes does not make you look twice as cool as smoking one.

  So I smoked a lot. And also—because I’m someone who worries—I really took seriously the issue of being addicted to cigarettes. So, for instance, if I had to take a two-hour plane ride, I would stock up on Nicorettes. If I had to take a two-hour train ride, I had a special device which would allow me to smoke in the bathroom without detection.

  I really liked smoking. But I also understood that it was bad for you.

  I tried to quit smoking when I was in college. I understood smoking to be a physical addiction, so I thou
ght the important thing was to overcome the physical addiction, which of course could only be done by not smoking.

  I also figured—and here was my miscalculation—that you couldn’t maintain a physical addiction if you had, say, just a couple of puffs of a cigarette each day.

  So I stopped smoking, but once in a while I would have a couple of puffs off a friend’s cigarette. Maybe at the end of the day I would have a haul or two off my roommate’s cigarette. In effect what I was doing was making smoking the reward for quitting smoking. This is not a good mechanism, and it did not work or last very long. And though I think it’s probably true that I overcame my physical addiction to nicotine, the physical addiction is just a small part of how these things work.

  After that, I didn’t consider trying to quit for a very long time. I just kept on smoking for fifteen years, pretty much nonstop, sometimes while swimming, sometimes in the middle of the night as a little break from sleeping. It was always kind of a bad time to quit, so I didn’t.

  I think the thing that really got me was taking a trip to Las Vegas. I really liked it there, but it also seemed so terrible to see the worst things about people all together—how easily people are controlled by money, and how easily people can be made to feel good about themselves when gambling because of something that happened by chance. Everything about the place sort of seemed like a study in how people’s appetites and cravings mislead them.

  And you can smoke everywhere.

  So I smoked more in Vegas than I’d ever smoked, all the time kind of thinking about these people around me who seemed like they were being tricked by everything. They were being tricked by these gambling games, they were being tricked by the problem of having a certain kind of job that required that you take a certain kind of vacation which was organized around a certain set of hopes about money, but the trick that clearly was working on me better than just about anyone else was the cigarette trick.