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  At this point, the councillor could no longer deny the force of our argument. He told us that if we wanted him to, he would oppose the patio in council. We’d won.

  * * *

  Then something funny happened. I was of course incredibly happy and really relieved, and also a tiny bit sad and a tiny bit worried. For all that I’d fought with the owners of the bar, I didn’t feel like they were terrible people, you know? They had a hard time keeping their DJs under control, and they were trying to run a new business, and I’m not saying it was right for them to do what they did, but I didn’t wish them ill. I felt bad for them. The patio was a huge part of the owners’ business plan, and I also realized I might be living next door to someone who felt I’d destroyed his business.

  The day of the council hearing, I was there and the bar owners were there, and some of the bar staff, and some people from the Residents’ Association were there. The meeting started, and before our matter came up, one of the people from the councillor’s office came up to me and said, The councillor wants to see if we can come to a compromise.

  And I felt furious. I thought, Screw you. We’ve won!

  But we all went into his office—the bar staff, the residents—and something really remarkable happened. He said, Look—you neighbors, you’re upset because this bar plays loud music late at night with its doors open, and that causes you all sorts of problems, and you want that to stop. And you—the bar owners—you really, really want this patio. So maybe we can work something out where you, the neighbors, you let these guys have a patio that’s a smaller patio than the bar asked for. You neighbors, do you care whether they have a patio that’s open at dinnertime? And we said no. Then he said to the bar owners, What do you want from the patio? The owners said, We want to do a strong dinner business there. He said to the bar owners, Look—if the residents let you have a patio that closes at eleven and which is smaller than what you’re asking for, would you be willing to promise that you’ll keep the music down—not just when the patio’s open, but all the time? They said sure.

  Everyone’s initial response heading into the room was basically, Fuck you, councillor. The guys who owned the bar felt strongly that they had already jumped through all the hoops they had to jump through to get their patio. It had been approved at every level, had passed in this stupid vote, and they were completely entitled to this thing the councillor was trying to take away from them. Our feeling was that we’d won—they had promised us that we had won—and now they were trying to take this away from us. But the councillor was really emphatic and really insistent that a compromise could be had, and bit by bit it became clear that he was right that we would be better off with the deal he was proposing than if we blocked the patio altogether.

  If we simply blocked the patio, all the existing problems with the bar would continue: they would likely continue to play loud music every night, even though they oughtn’t to according to the unenforceable noise bylaw. I figured that, realistically, they would be less inclined to take our concerns into account, as they would see us as enemies and would have nothing more to lose by pissing us off—and I’d get to live next door to a business whose owners hated me. On the other hand, if we gave them a small patio, the cost to us was actually pretty minimal, because no one thought that a patio open at seven, eight, or nine o’clock was going to be very disruptive. In exchange, we could get the owners to agree to all kinds of conditions, and there would be a mechanism for enforcement, because if they failed to meet the conditions, they could lose their patio license.

  So, in fact, this compromise was a better outcome than the victory we had imagined for ourselves. And that stayed with me forever. I think it’s an incredible lesson. The fact that something can be better than winning in an apparently antagonistic situation like this one seems so important. Equally important is the ease with which you can mistake damage to the other party for advantage to yourself. We were so angry at the bar owners that we wanted to make sure they didn’t gain an inch on their patio application, when in truth, their being open for dinner is, if anything, probably advantageous for us all. But we were just so embroiled in trying to stop their late-night business that we were blinded to that fact.

  Sitting there in the councillor’s office, we wrote a fairly painstakingly detailed set of conditions for this patio license. The license was conditional on their being better neighbors in a dozen different ways. They could no longer play music with the doors or windows open. They had to keep their music to levels where it couldn’t be heard in the adjoining apartments, including mine. They had to hire staff to discourage their customers from yelling and screaming. They had to have regular meetings with their neighbors to stay on top of the issues. And a whole bunch of other little things. I think there were something like sixteen conditions in the license. It was a complicated document. But we were able to write it in about twenty minutes because we’d all been thinking about this stuff so much.

  And it worked! It took a while for it to work, and at first it wasn’t easy to get all the conditions enforced. It took a few months. But now I never hear music from the bar. Crowds of smokers gather outside their doors, which still creates pretty serious problems for the people who live next door to the patio, but that would’ve been the case regardless. They never play loud music that you can hear across the street. And for them, their patio is pretty successful, and their business is doing well.

  In all these conversations, one thing the owners had always maintained was that they had no interest in the bar being as loud as it was, and friends of mine now tell me that their customers generally complained that their music was too loud. The hard thing, it turns out, was controlling the DJs, who aren’t bar staff. So, really, it turns out that the quieter music levels in the bar don’t even feel like a compromise to the bar owners and their customers. Everyone prefers it this way.

  The Residents’ Association still exists. New bars open in our neighborhood all the time. And we’re a lot better at working with the bar owners to figure out how they can be good neighbors. But having so many bars in the neighborhood does make it really hard to live in. There are some people who own bars who are mad at me, though they’re in the minority—most of them are pretty nice. The neighborhood is also now filled with guys in suits peeing in doorways, and people yelling and screaming, and people leaving trash all over and stealing my newspaper and putting garbage in my bike basket. And they feel like real invaders sometimes. There’s a sort of class component, too, in that the people who come to drink in our neighborhood tend to be richer young people from other neighborhoods. It sometimes feels like they come to slum in our neighborhood, the badlands where you can behave inappropriately.

  12. There Are Some Games I Won’t Play with My Friends

  Starting a few years ago, a bunch of my friends started playing a game called Mafia. It is a game played by about fifteen people in a circle. Three of the people are Mafia members who kill other players, and it’s up to the rest of the group to figure out who those three are through a process of questioning.

  When people are playing Mafia, they get into really impassioned arguments and accusations. To win at the game, you need to be really good at convincing people that other people are lying, and convincing people that you’re telling the truth when you’re not.

  My friends played it pretty regularly, but I only ever played the game once. I was a Mafia member, and I won by convincing everybody that I wasn’t one. I thought, Why would I ever want to play this game again? Partly I just didn’t want to ruin my perfect record, but partly it seemed like a really self-defeating sort of victory. If you’re really good at charades, your friends might end up thinking, Wow, this person is really good at communicating things or at understanding what other people are trying to convey, even in difficult situations. But when you win at Mafia, people just think, Wow, that person is really good at convincing me that they’re being honest when in fact they are lying. Why would I want my friends to think that about me?

/>   13. Social Music

  Over the past hundred years or so, music has become a much less social experience for a lot of people. Music used to be something you did, something you made with the people around you. Now, for many people, it’s something made by skilled professionals you have never met, that you listen to as a largely passive audience, often at a substantial spatial and temporal distance from the performance.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love the present-day mediascape. I’m not calling for a return to the good old days. I think it’s amazing that we all have instant access to a universe of music, all the time. But there’s also something exciting about the dimension of music that’s social, that’s about making it together.

  I run a series called Terrible Noises for Beautiful People, which is pretty much all about the question: What sorts of aesthetically interesting experiences can you give to an audience by having them choose sounds and make sounds together, rather than by having them listen to sounds chosen by and made by someone else? Some of the Terrible Noises events are structured as classes, some are more like participatory events—performances where all the sounds are made by the audience.

  During these events, people are able to derive a lot of aesthetic pleasure from the very simplest group exercises. You get a roomful of people and you ask them to close their eyes and make and hold a vowel sound together. And you know what? It sounds amazing! I mean, it’s the most boring, unmusical sound you can imagine—a couple of dozen people holding an unpitched drone. But when you’re in it, when you are doing it with people, it can be very beautiful and very interesting. There’s lots of reasons for this, but the one I’m most interested in is that people have so little opportunity to enjoy the social component of music that doing an exercise like this stimulates a part of our musical enjoyment that’s really underused—the part that just enjoys making sounds with other people.

  I’m really interested in weaving the social and the musical together. I do a game called converge/diverge where people move toward a unison where everyone is making the same sound, then move back out toward increased difference, then move back in again toward convergence. The challenge of that piece is not only musical, it’s social—how can a large group of people collectively choose a single sound to make? It’s a hard thing do, and it calls into question all kinds of things about leadership, compromise, listening, and individuality.

  Tension and resolution are basic ideas in music. If someone sings half a melody and stops in the middle, even if you’ve never heard the melody before, you’ll know that that’s not the end and it will sound dissatisfying. You know this because we have a set of rules about tension and resolution in music that mostly have to do with harmonic movement. A musical piece moves to a place of tension, which feels unstable or incomplete, then to resolution, which feels satisfying and done.

  In the converge/diverge piece, tension in the game happens as disagreement, and resolution happens as agreement. Since the piece is meant to be listened to by the people who are playing the game, when you hear the sonic component of agreement or disagreement, you are also simultaneously experiencing it on a social level. I think the interaction between those levels—between the social interactions and the way you hear and create those sounds—is complicated and exciting and mysterious.

  14. Manners

  For a while, I wrote a manners column for a magazine. On one level, manners is really just a tiny little subset of ethics. What having good manners is about is not making yourself more important than other people, which is what most ethics is about. People know that kind of instinctively.

  I think manners also specifically end up being about a couple of other things: rules and communication. Things become a lot easier when people have shared standards of what’s expected, and a lot more complicated when people don’t.

  The famous example of this in ethics is the rule that says you drive on the right-hand side of the road. No one imagines that there’s some way in which driving on the right-hand side of the road is inherently better than driving on the left-hand side, but it’s tremendously important that everyone agrees on the side, even though the rule is arbitrary. Manners work that way, too. People get pissed off at each other when one person has one set of expectations in their head and the other person has another. So, for instance, if everyone thinks a guest at a dinner party is obliged to bring a bottle of wine, things will work out okay. I’ll bring wine to your place, you’ll bring wine to my place. If I’m one of eight guests, we’ll all bring wine. But if I exist in a social circle where half the people think bringing wine is the thing to do, and half the people don’t, you’re likely to end up with resentment, because some people will feel they’re providing too much wine.

  There’s not really any reason for favoring one of these rules over the other. It’s perfectly fine for it not to be an expectation for people to bring wine—that a host should provide everything for their guests and that that’s what it means to be a host, and we all take turns being one. And of course it’s fine the other way around. Mostly what matters is that there be agreement.

  I actually think about this a lot with the Residents’ Association. Occasionally people say, well, in Latin American countries people happily live in neighborhoods where people play music all night long, and there’s none of this sense that you’re obliged to protect your neighbors from noise.

  And I guess what I think is that, yes, a culture like that can work. If I live in a culture where hearing other people’s music and noise is the norm, then that’s great. When I feel like listening to loud music late at night, I can do that. It’s not that one attitude is necessarily better than the other, it’s that we have to find one that’s consistent and agreed upon. In general, I think the rule we tend to have in our culture is that it’s not okay to make loud noise late at night, and if there’s agreement on that rule, people can get along. But if there’s not agreement, people feel resentful—not only because they don’t like to hear loud noises at night, but because they feel bound by the other side of the agreement, which is that they’re not allowed to make loud noises late at night.

  By and large, contemporary society tends not to be a society with an incredible number of stated formal rules for behavior. We can use whatever fork we want for our salad and we don’t use formal terms of address very often. The rules tend to be tacit and open-ended. We also tend to move between circles where the rules—tacit and open-ended as they are—change.

  When I wrote my manners column, a lot of the time the question posed would be, I think this, my friend thinks that, who’s right? And it’s funny because often no one’s right. If my friend thinks she should drive on the right-hand side of the road and I think I should drive on the left and there’s no existing rule, no side is right. What matters is that there’s agreement. I guess if I were a more influential manners columnist, I could be the person to establish these norms. But in the end, most of the advice I ended up giving people was to try to talk to the other people involved.

  Once, I was asked about when it’s okay not to give up your seat in the subway. Manners dictate that the other person go first; that you give up your seat. But sometimes you’re really tired and you’ve had a hard day and you’re carrying something heavy and you really want to sit and you think the seat would serve you better than the other person. Can you slip ahead and take that seat? they asked.

  The answer I gave, which I was really happy with, was: Ask them for it. Say to them, I’ve had a really long day and I’m exhausted and would it be okay if I sat down? Because, first of all, you’re using direct communication. Also, you’re letting them give it to you. You’re being polite, which in terms of etiquette means a bunch of things. First, to let someone give something to you, you have to let them own it first. And you’re letting it be their choice. In the first instance, where you push ahead and take their seat, they’ll feel like, Oh, some asshole stole a seat from me. But in asking for the seat, if you do it right, they’ll feel like a good person because
they did a favor for a nice stranger.

  15. How to Improvise, and How Not to Not Improvise

  There are a few things people do when they improvise. The worst attitude toward improvising—or the one that’s least interesting to me—is to see it as a parlor trick, where you improvise by trying to be as prepared as you possibly can be for the various situations that might arise.

  When I did theater improv, we would do scenes in different genres. You ask the audience for genre and they say, Do a western! or Do a sci-fi! It was understood that a good improviser would study the conventions of the genre and try to identify some of the clichés.

  Then the audience would say, Look at how skilled these people are! You can throw anything at them and they can handle anything well! But for the improviser, that means you’re prepared—not that you’re improvising. The audience gives you a genre and you think, Oh great! I’m ready for this! But wouldn’t it be more interesting and fun to think, How great! I’ve never thought about this before. I’m surprised by this suggestion!

  The idea that improvisers would eliminate surprise from their own experience goes against my ideas about what’s interesting about improvisation as a practice—and I’m much more interested in improvisation as a practice, or as something to do, than as something for people to watch.

  * * *

  Why would someone go to see an improv show? What I began to feel as a performer after a while was, Maybe if we really cared about our audience, we’d write something for them beforehand. Otherwise it’s just a display of skill—which is the most boring kind of art. The audience sits there and thinks, Wow, it sure is impressive that they made up something on the spot which is almost as funny as it would have been if they’d written it before!

  The idea that the point of art is to be impressive is—to me—incredibly distressing. Skill should be a means to an end, or it becomes like watching acrobatics, or being very tall. There’s a subset of guitar geeks who like to watch people perform very difficult guitar solos. They think, Wow! That guy sure can play fast and play complicated chord changes! But is that better than someone who can create a well-crafted song with subtlety?