The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  When playing the game, especially to teach music improvisation, I encourage people to try not to communicate in any way other than the movement and placement of these rocks. No talking or facial expressions or pointing.

  So you’re moving rocks, but by moving these rocks, you’re also at the same time commenting on the movement of the rocks. You’re expressing approval or disapproval of a set of patterns or gestures by how you respond to them with rocks. Aesthetics emerge very quickly. So when someone places a rock down, you might think, Aha! Wasn’t that a brilliant thing to do with a rock! Or, That ruins everything. Or, That was kind of boring.

  I like the way the game teaches something fundamental about music improvisation that can be hard to talk about otherwise. The stuff that happens in an abstract sound improvisation is very difficult to discuss, but with rocks you can literally point at them and everyone sees the same thing. The game provides really nice, genuinely physical, concrete illustrations of the sort of stuff that happens in music improvisation.

  I think playing the game can make people smart about things like: what it means to participate in a pattern versus what it means to break a pattern; what it means to try to start a new pattern or to do something that’s a counterpoint.

  In order to enjoy the game—and all these games need to be enjoyed to be played properly—you need to figure out how to take pleasure in having limited control over what happens. If you want the patterns to unfold exactly as you want them to, you’ll find the game frustrating. At the same time, if you have no attachment to the outcome, you’ll find the game boring. The best thing is to have an intention, but also to be open to surprise.

  24. Some Video on the Internet

  One of the most dispiriting things about people, for me, is their capacity to be blinded by a sort of good-guy, bad-guy thinking. So if some individual or group becomes your enemy, then suddenly everything they do becomes suspect, whereas everything that your team does is okay.

  There was this video floating around the Internet, where someone went around with a camera to McCain-Palin rallies and interviewed people with the goal of getting them to say pretty provocative things, and the questions were there—they were part of the tape—and you could hear them asking these provocative questions and trying to get people to say that Obama is a terrorist or to say things that sort of bordered on racism.

  Then this video was cut together and put online, presumably to stir up outrage among Democrats. Now, to me, that video is just so infuriating and unfair. I mean, what does it really tell us? That among McCain supporters there are some people that are stupid? Is that really surprising? I’m sure there are plenty of stupid people among Democrats, and there are stupid Greens, and there are plenty of stupid feminists, and stupid libertarians, and stupid Communists, and stupid people who believe in evolution, and stupid people who believe in Christianity. Pretty much any ideology and point of view is populated by at least some stupid people. It’s not that surprising to learn that there are some dumb, racist people in America, and even less surprising to learn that those people support the white candidate over the black one. But what does that tell us? Is there really anything wrong with McCain for having dumb people among his supporters?

  The really dispiriting part was seeing this posted on MetaFilter, which is this online forum that I like to read in large part because it always seems to be populated by fairly reasonable, intelligent people. I looked through the comments on MetaFilter, and pretty much everybody agreed with each other, expressing their moral outrage and disgust at the McCain rally, making great gestures of their tremendous despair for the country—that the electoral process had sunk so low.

  Mostly, people on MetaFilter are Democrats. And there’s no question in my mind that had there been a video where some right-wing reporter went out and found the stupidest, most extreme, most lunatic supporters of Obama and strung together a video of them, everyone on the forum would have been furious at the videographer. But here, somehow, people couldn’t see that.

  This just makes me nuts about people. It’s as though there’s this part of the human brain that allows us to perceive the moral failings and intellectual shortcomings of our enemies so clearly—often even in cases where they don’t even exist—while at the same time being blind to the moral failings and intellectual shortcomings of our friends.

  25. People Who Take My Classes

  Graduate students

  Musicians

  People who work at ad agencies

  People who take a lot of workshops

  Fans of Trampoline Hall

  A surprising number of high school teachers

  College professors

  Quakers

  26. Shut Up and Listen

  It’s amazing to me that someone can have the courage to write a book or to stand up onstage and talk for a long time. It just seems impossible to imagine that what you have to say might be so important that other people would want to sit down and listen to it or take time out of their life to read it.

  So this book is a weird project for me. There’s all this stuff that’s in my head that I think about. It’s not easy for me to imagine that it could be interesting to anyone else.

  Margaux and I had an argument about this, watching some terrible monologues being performed at some club in New York. I was so angry and outraged that they thought that it was fair to make the demand, I’m going to talk now and you all have to shut up and listen. I told Margaux, You have to be really sure that what you are saying is worthwhile and good before you ask that of people.

  She thought I was wrong. She thought that to do any kind of art, you need to be willing to have people pay attention to it, and you don’t know whether it’s going to be any good. If the contract is that you have to be absolutely certain that it’s going to be worth people’s while, nobody would do anything. No one’s forcing people to shut up and listen.

  I think she’s probably right, but I can’t help feeling this way.

  27. Is Monogamy a Trick?

  When I was younger, I thought that monogamy was a trick. It was a trick that society played on people to make them serve the needs of global capital better—to domesticate or tame the real pleasures of sex, to make people into better workers and consumers. I guess my evidence for this at the time was just that there was so much about the idea of monogamy that didn’t make sense. I spent a lot of time learning about different kinds of open relationships, but in the end there were many things about open relationships that didn’t make sense either. I think the truth is that any individual has a wild number of desires and needs and fears about sex and intimacy and wanting to take care of someone and wanting to be taken care of, and within any one person there’s a lot of contradictory desires. Then, between any two people the number of contradictions among those desires is just squared.

  So anything you do is going to be fucked-up. And I think it’s really easy, with anything, to see all the ways in which the existing system is fucked-up, and sometimes it’s really hard—or at least harder—to see where the fuckups might lie in the system that might replace it. So it’s true, for instance, that open relationships solve the problems of monogamy, but they also create their own set of problems that are just as bad or, in fact, it seems to me, worse.

  * * *

  I really do feel that, in the past thirty years or so, people have gotten a lot better at being in couples. I was talking to a friend of my dad’s, I think, who was talking about his son, who’s a few years younger than me, who’d recently gotten married, and he was so happy for his kid and so optimistic about his son’s relationship. He said, Yeah, that marriage is really going to last. He said, Our generation had no fucking idea what we were doing, but I really think kids today are going into marriage so much better prepared and smarter. And I really think that’s true.

  The idea that love is completely magic, and that it’s normal and to be expected that you’re going to be head over heels in love all the time with the person you’re marri
ed to, had a lot of currency in the mid-twentieth century. Of course the consequence of that belief is that if you feel something other than this magical emotion, it’s a sign of big trouble.

  I think that’s the typical Hollywood-movie idea of love, which is of course completely toxic and destructive. Then a related idea, probably more of a hippie idea of love, is that the most important thing in a relationship is to be true to yourself, which means that you need to always express everything, and that every emotion you feel has to be addressed, and that the relationship should always make you feel good. This philosophy probably led to a lot of savable marriages of my parents’ generation falling apart because people were unwilling to endure the natural difficulty or sacrifice that’s part of a desirable marriage.

  * * *

  Speaking of course incredibly generally, I feel that young people today seem to know all this, and I think they go into marriage with an understanding of the kind of communication that’s involved and with some sort of realistic idea of what they can expect. And I think the first glimmers of this are starting to happen in child rearing, too. The way people talked about husbands and wives thirty or forty or fifty years ago suggested that love took one of two forms: the ideal Hollywood-movie version of love, where people were just head over heels, no-questions-asked in love with each other, or the “take my wife, please” battle-ax-joke kind of attitude.

  I think people are just now starting to bring about that same kind of transformation in their attitudes about child rearing. Up until recently, I think parents described child rearing as this completely wondrous, miraculous thing, in a way that reminds me of the way people used to talk about marriage: something perfect and free of compromise. Or else parents would complain about the kids in an old battle-ax kind of way.

  Wouldn’t we now be suspicious of someone who talked about their marriage just as a nonstop journey of wonder filled with harp music? Yet people still take that attitude when they talk about their kids. Personally, I’m looking forward to that being less and less the case. Families might be able to work better once people can talk about the experience of child rearing with the same amount of sophistication and nuance we’ve been able to bring to romantic relationships in the past couple of decades.

  28. The Conducting Game

  I sometimes do noise games in class settings with smaller groups of ten to twenty people, but I also sometimes do larger participatory events, where an audience of fifty to a hundred people make sounds together for a single performance. For instance, I did a twelve-hour version of a noise event at Nuit Blanche, an overnight arts festival in Toronto, where we brought people in off the street to make sounds together. I did a noise event at a tower in California, and I played noise games with a bunch of programmers at a computer conference.

  Here is a music improv game that can be played by a group of ten to a hundred people:

  You walk around the room and make sounds, whatever sounds you want. If and when you decide you want to be conducted, you stand still and put your hand up and point at your head.

  If you see someone who wants to be conducted, you should conduct them. Don’t leave people standing there waiting to be conducted, because it’s impolite.

  The conducted piece should last about a minute or a minute and a half, and it ends when either person walks away. When you walk away, don’t say bye or anything. Just leave. Then you walk around some more.

  The notes for conducting are: Conduct with as much specificity as possible in your gestures. Use very clear and deliberate gestures. Be as emphatic as possible. Try to fill each gesture with a lot of urgency and meaning. Trust that the person you’re conducting is great at what they do and is going to make great sounds. Know that the gestures will be interpreted as having meanings that you do not intend—that’s okay.

  For the person being conducted: Trust that the conductor knows exactly what they’re doing. Trust that they’re a great conductor and that you’re excited to work with them. Trust that you know instinctively, immediately, and completely what every single gesture means. Trust that this person is going to extract incredible sounds from you, and that everything that comes out of you—all the sounds that you make—are their responsibility. You should respond to the emotional content in the conducting and ascribe as much meaning as possible to every component of their gestures—their facial expression, whether or not their fingers are curved. Assume that every element of the conducting has meaning.

  * * *

  This game is largely about dialogue and control. It might look like the conductor is in control, but that’s not really the case. The game is actually a dialogue between the conductor and the person being conducted. It’s a dialogue in which both parties are in a perpetual state of surprise and experiencing lack of control.

  For instance, the conductor might slowly raise one fist in the air and then open up all the fingers of his hands and clench his shoulders. No one really knows what that’s going to sound like, but the person being conducted very quickly decides what that means and what that sounds like, so both people are being surprised.

  As for the person being conducted, if the game is going well, you really feel like the other person is controlling you—you feel not in control, like they’re making everything happen. But really you’re the author of all the sounds in the piece. There’s not a single sound in it that wasn’t devised by you, the person being conducted. It’s all choices you have made. This is one part of improv that I think is really critical—this experience of feeling not at all responsible while actually being completely responsible.

  The same is true for the conductor, but less obviously so. When you’re on the outside watching the game, it’s clear that the conductor serves to inspire the sound-maker. If you just put people in a room and say, I want you to make interesting sounds that change a lot, and that do interesting things and are varied, people will have a very hard time doing that. But if you put someone in front of them, a person making essentially meaningless gestures, and call that person the conductor and say that the conductor is in charge, then people can make these really amazing sounds. People do fantastic work in this game very quickly. The conductor serves to inspire them, and gives them permission to do much more, by appearing to take away control while not really taking away control.

  The conductors can also feel inspired by the people being conducted. If you’re asked to make a bunch of really dramatic gestures, you might find that difficult to do, but if you’re a conductor in a dialogue with a person who’s making these inspiring and incredible sounds, you find you can make really interesting gestures easily and spontaneously. It goes both ways.

  29. Sitting on the Same Side of the Table

  We’re all proud of our society’s ability to bring things about without violence. So, for instance, we applaud freely elected governments, where the reins of state can change hands without people having to kill people. But I think that a more advanced version of that goal is to be able to do things without antagonism.

  We don’t still put people in gladiator rings for amusement. We don’t think dueling is an acceptable way for people to settle their differences. But so many of our institutions are still based on models of antagonism as the best way to find solutions to a problem. So in the electoral process you see two candidates running for office, and it always gets presented as a kind of battle. It’s true that at some level they’re opponents—they both want the office, but there’s only one space—but at some level they’re also people who want the same thing, to the degree to which they’re honest candidates, which I think many people are. What they want is for the country to do well, for people to prosper and be at peace. Even if they do have wildly divergent ideas about how to get there, somehow we’ve turned the electoral process into a kind of gladiator match where we think the best way to choose a leader is to throw people into a ring and make them fight each other and we can sort of lift up the winner.

  It’s the same thing with lawmaking institutions. Often, d
ebate is the mode through which legislative ideas are presented. What all the people in that legislative body want—at least in theory—is to produce laws that are fair and serve people well. They may have completely different ideas as to what that constitutes, but there’s something that to me feels so atavistic about having people battle each other for the right to enter the legislative chamber, then once they’re there, to battle each other again to decide what the actual laws should be. It just feels like a throwback to a worse time in humanity.

  I’d love to see institutions that somehow operate on the assumption that people can hold vastly different opinions and preferences and desires without having to become enemies, and also without having to lose track of the desires they have that are shared.

  There’s a great book about all this called Getting to Yes. It’s from the early eighties. In Getting to Yes, the author explains that in a negotiation it helps to literally sit on the same side of the table as each other. And it’s hard. It’s hard not to keep falling back into the traps of antagonism. So, for instance, if the other side does something that you feel is dishonest or disrespectful, it’s hard not to think, Well, fuck ’em—even if that fuck ’em might mean creating a situation where it’s worse for them but also worse for you. This kind of battle approach is hardwired, but it leads to all kinds of lose-lose situations.

  The basic idea is to transform a negotiation from a situation where two people are pushing against each other to a situation where people are working toward a common solution. So you may have a lot of different desires and interests and senses of what’s fair, but you’re also trying to solve a problem together. You want to come to a solution that resolves all those things. And the fact that you want different things doesn’t have to make you enemies.