A puzzle pirate from Stockholm, or space

[imomus]

My talk at the AIGA conference (photos courtesy of Stu Alden) felt totally strange. I was programmed at the end of the Friday afternoon main stage sessions, and came right after slick design gameshow Command X (a sort of Weakest Link for designers), so the audience was in a kind of "TV-watching, zoned-out, end-of-the-week" mood. There'd just been an excellent presentation by Christoph Niemann in which he showed his inventive, retro-yet-radical illustrations. And then I came on like some sort of weird preacher, talking about "soul" and authenticity. (Later, some branding experts told me that what I, in my Shinto-Calvinist way, was calling the "soul" is known in branding as SOI: single organizing idea. It's apparently a term from Jim Collins’ 1994 business book, "Built to Last".)



I knew it was going to be difficult when the vast sea of delegates (there must have been two thousand) failed to raise the slightest ripple of laughter at my ice-breaking opening remarks: "In my parallel career as an electronic folk musician I never play venues as big as this -- design must be the new rock and roll... or at least the new electronic folk music." Zero response. "So when AIGA said I just had 20 minutes I thought I'd be able to talk about the entire future -- and you can say anything about the future, it's a kind of fiction -- but also the last 2000 years of Western philosophy." No sound from the audience. They appeared to be thinking "This guy is weird. Why's he wearing an eye-patch? When can we go and get a drink?"

I started by quoting the David Byrne song In The Future, and thought my nervousness would allow me to do a good impression of Byrne's early interview style. Instead I simply garbled the lines somewhat. I also tried to extemporize rather than follow my notes closely, so I missed some of the connections between ideas and jumped about from one theme to another. There were only two moments when I heard that vast sea of people -- bigger than any crowd I've addressed since touring Japan with Kahimi Karie in 1998 -- ripple with appreciation. One was when I described how the Heidelberg restaurant in New York was more German than anything in Germany, and how, when I asked the yodelling lederhosen-clad waiter if he was German I got the answer "Sometimes". The other was when I described watching the wifi signals go by on my iPod Touch while sitting in a taxi heading up Park Avenue, and said that this might be a new, manmade sort of "smell". That got some laughs.

There was a dialogue with moderator Kurt Anderson, which went much better -- I think my ideas work much better when I have to explain them to someone asking good questions -- and was also more relaxed and informal. My heart sank slightly when I heard Anderson conclude with "Why are British people so much more clever than Americans?", though, because I'd hate to think it just looked like I was showing off intellectually. Afterwards about a dozen people told me they'd found the ideas particularly stimulating or found something I'd said resonant, so it does seem to have sparked more empathy and interest than I felt on the stage.

One person I met said his first impression had been "this guy is from space", and I must say that's very much how I felt. I felt like I totally lacked the slick patter of some of the American delegates, their knowledge of how to stoke up the audience. A speaker an hour or so before me had given what struck me as a disastrously narcissistic talk. I sat there cringing on her behalf, until suddenly the audience broke into whoops of affirmation. It didn't seem to have phased them at all. I felt the same cultural disconnect when football logos I thought were too masculine and aggressive were criticized from the stage as too feminine! I suppose that's what "being from space" feels like; you simply don't see things the same way. What seems self-evident to you seems like a puzzling non sequitur to someone else.

My thinking probably contains too much paradox, too much ambivalent binary play and provisional dialectic (provisional because I abandon those binary structures pretty soon after introducing them). It comes mostly from a post-Marxist, post-structuralist European tradition -- Adorno and Barthes and Derrida -- which doesn't really fit with the way Americans think. And, facing that somewhat blank, puzzled audience, failing to push their buttons, I felt quite keenly the flavour of my own career-long marginality. Call it "failure to communicate with people who see the world differently" or "inability to get beyond preaching to the choir". Call it "not equipped to sell more than 5000 albums or get more than 20,000 views on YouTube". Call it some kind of glass ceiling between me and anything mainstream.

Reading an article in The Guardian about Gore's Nobel Peace Prize, I identified (sadly) with some of the cautionary things Martin Kettle was saying. I'd ended my talk with a reference to Gore's win -- a reference I somehow imagined would get some claps or cheers, but again was greeted with stony silence by the audience. I've always liked Gore, liked his intelligence, his way of connecting things. I remember a New Yorker interview which described him making diagrams on napkins of how everything in the world was connected, unexpectedly, to everything else. That's how I think too, but I realize that it doesn't seem nearly as self-evident to other people out there, and for this reason we "associational thinkers" tend, as Martin Kettle says, to be people "whose comfort zone is in opposition rather than in power". Gore may well have been right about climate change, says Kettle, but "out there on mainstream American breakfast TV yesterday there were fewer headlines about Al Gore than about Britney Spears".

Of course, it's possible it's the mainstream that's "from space". Out here in the Midwest, I really do feel something like that. It's weird here. People have been staring at me since I arrived, and yet to me it's this place that's strange, not me. Denver -- with its Toys-R-Us, SimCity feel -- could just have landed from Mars. "Are you from Sweden?" elderly couples ask me in the hotel elevator. I look at my conference ID tag. "Nick Currie Momus Stockholm Sweden," it says. "Actually I'm from Scotland," I say, "but it's not far from Stockholm. Maybe they misheard."

Comments

[ex-newironsh15.livejournal.com]

it's a sort of essentialism, isn't it? "here comes the man from britain to say complicated things and not stir his gin and tonic with his finger"

ugh denver ugh. it strikes me as very american but i've only changed planes there about 50 times.

if design talks in america are anything like academic journals, you're supposed to create a link to al-qaeda. a nice 2nd or 3rd paragraph that starts off "design separates us from al-qaeda, who hate nice things, puppies, snowcones, etc". Don't Worry About the Derrida

you're not cynical enough for america

[dmlaenker.livejournal.com]

No, no, no - you're just thinking of the "red states". In a talk in New York or San Francisco, you're supposed to reference transhumanism and how technology will end government and society forever (trying to sound positive and serious in the same breath).

[ixzist.livejournal.com]

it might be the rarified air of the mile-high city that made his audience taciturn

nick's design

[wrayb.livejournal.com]

thoughtful write up of your experience.

after reading, at first I was wondering how did it come about that you were invited to speak there, then looking at the conference web site and seeing the list of the other presenters I must point out that likely very few of the attendees are from Denver thus your melding of your impression of the place with the event is extremely subjective. Note the asides you said were best received had a New York reference which most of the attendees likely know as a place even if not as a base.

pardon, but I am too lazy to address your other points except that my own subjective experience is that Doris Lessing got more coverage than Gore did on their winning. Very subjective since it just happened that yahoo had Lessing links featured at the time the other day when I was logging in to my e-mail account and that I don't read any of the new papers that I happened to see with headlines about Gore. In this age of info glut, when you get beyond the MAJOR HEADLINES it seems to becoming fairly ideosyncratic or circumstancial what one's points of reference are.

cheers.

Re: nick's design

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, you're quite right that it's not really fair to run impressions of being started on the streets of Denver with impressions of not connecting with the designers in the hall, who certainly weren't all locals. I'd no doubt have done much worse at the Beer Festival that was going on alongside our conference!

I think the problem is just that I'm not a "main stage, big tent" kind of guy. I work in little cliquey margins, with people who already at least half speak my language and at least half agree with my outlook on life.

One thing I was talking about in the address was how my Metaphysical Masochism of the Capitalist Creative essay had posited the idea that only gay people, Japanese and designers really care about texture, care about things for their own sake, care about use value rather than exchange value. This is a kind of delusion I have -- that there are people out there who have a totally different set of values, and that I can feel with those people, and mingle with them, and work with them.

I do still sort of believe that, but I think maybe "designers" is too big a category, and that many designers are just regular folks who can be addressed by the regular sort of entertainments the mainstream uses. The mere fact of their being designers doesn't enter them, necessarily, into the cult I'm also part of. I describe this dawning realization in my piece about American textures (http://imomus.livejournal.com/117896.html). There are two marches happening in New York City, one of gays, the other of Christians. And I discover that they have very similar dress sense and body shapes; texturally they aren't different at all. And then I realize the gays are gay Christians, and their banners all say things like "Jesus doesn't hate gays". So there aren't really enlightened marginals at all, there's just this mainstream weird religion with its atavistic ideas, and then a group of people who accept its basic principles too, but wish it didn't condemn them.

Borrow Tics

[(Anonymous)]

Who is Tibor S. Crow? You made an allusion on ilx once, and I haven't been able to find anything more.

Re: Borrow Tics

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No idea, I probably made him up!

[violet-hemlock.livejournal.com]

strange indeed. I would think you would have been a folk hero to them...oh well. Figures that they would laugh at the wi-fi cab ride joke.Still, interesting, and you infected a few minds I'm sure.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Well, you´re looking very... beige.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

(http://tinypic.com)

[diggets.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'd characterize Colorado as "Midwest" -- it's West. More cowboy and pickup truck than Walker Art Center. Very conservative, small-government & paranoid.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I actually wondered about that, and looked up Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States) to see where the Midwest ends. It told me:

"Today, the term "Far West" means the West Coast, and people as far west as the prairie sections of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana sometimes identify themselves with the term Midwest."

I guess Denver is just beyond the prairies, though.

Very conservative, small-government & paranoid.

Well, I have to say I was impressed by Mayor Hickenlooper (http://www.citymayors.com/mayors/denver_mayor.html), who gave a presentation on Thursday. He understands the central role of culture in urban redevelopment, and he's got free (and emissions free) public buses, as well as trams, running through the city centre. He's also got international architecture stars doing buildings here. Which you can criticize on one level as flashy, iconic globalized vanilla, but praise on another level as enlightened city planning.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Hmm, where you the only non-American giving a speech there? I read in a book on how to construct and preform a speech in front of a crowd that Americans and Swedes are the worst in the world at giving public speeches.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Oh, by the way momus, you talk like yourself but you dress in a way that might clash with your little speech.

Maybe it gave you a low etos?

Re: nick's design

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

it's a tricky thing to address a big audience. and i also made the observation that many americans seem especially apt to the task, and can in any situation produce a convincingly self assured, authoritative yet conversational tone. my first lecture in english i did in finland in 2001, and it went a bit bumpy, with lots of good material, but presented rather stiff due to too much prepared texts i could read from - while fellow comic artist joe sacco made a prime example of the above.
then again, u.s. comic artist ben katchor, a seasoned performer of lectures and readings, who i'd seen perform his lecture on the international culture of museum cafeterias at the jewish museum in berlin to great acclaim, held the same lecture at the berlin design conference "typo", to a much larger audience, getting a bit nervous, and, quite like you, i guess, irritating the audience with his subtle, ironic, humorist approach that interrupted the tone of bragging about ones own highly marketable achievements, the stance of "industrial cool".

i'll do my second lecture in english on monday, at an art school in denmark, and this time, i will speak freely, without notes, which always works better for me; i better let my brain take some unexpected turns than hope i can make it make me execute a schemed performance. but i'll talk more about my own work than before, thus meeting an expectation of the audience when confronted with someone working in the field he's talking about - picture writing or narrative/documentary/essayistic drawing, in this case.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

This is why I don't attend design gatherings.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I didn't take the wifi network "smell" comment as a joke, really--I thought it was a novel way of looking at new technology. There should have been gasps alongside those laughs.

Christoph, a German, always goes over well at these things. He's actually quite beloved in the design community. To what do you account his success before these audiences? That he has managed to coin his own way of combining "gee whiz" crowd-pleasing elements and insightful quips?

There are very, very talented people at these things, but from my point of view their mindset tends to veer towards the conventional and tame.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_grimtales_/]

The projection makes you look like Patrick Troughton in the first picture somehow...

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Surely its John Huston in Planet of The Apes?

[mme-furiosa.livejournal.com]

O' Dear Momus,

Firstly, I despise Colorado in general, and Denver in particular. It is decidedly Midwestern, in the sense that it is heavily populated by people from the "I" states who think they want to head out West but seem to be comforted by the flatlands and conservatism of Denver. The mountains are lovely, but the culture is as bland as they come, with a little "gentleman cowboy" thrown in for fun.

Too bad your talk was less scintillating than disorienting. Coming from a design profession, I've determined that (by far and large) American approach to design is largely predicated on market research and trend forecasting. I'm afraid your brand of connect-the-dots thoughtfulness and insight are foreign to this milieu.

Anyhow, if I were you I would toast myself tonight to celebrate feeling like an alien here. If you felt native, I would fear for the very fiber of your soul. And by "soul" I mean "soul" and nothing else.

Toys-R-Us, SimCity feel

[agoraphiliac.livejournal.com]

Denver is strange. I've been here a few months, though I probably haven't a great deal more of it than you did.

As you get a little farther out of downtown, you discover the user-unfriendliness of the light rail. It runs right next to freight trains. (At my stop, as at many others outside downtown, I have to walk across the freight tracks to leave the station.) When you get off the light rail, you find yourself in a strange "backstage" area of the city, decidedly not meant to be walked in: lumber warehouses, the blank rear walls of big-box stores like Toys-R-Us, highway overpasses, "park-n-ride" parking lots.

Even the "front-stage" area of the city, the parts you are meant to look at, the wide streets, the empty spaces with big sculptures plonked onto them, and the general flatness and brownness--it feels like Mars to me, too.

Big sky = empty ground.

Re: Toys-R-Us, SimCity feel

[dmlaenker.livejournal.com]

Big sky = empty ground.

Thank you. Most people who say things like "big sky country" sort of gloss over the antisocial implications of the term.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

That is an excellent jacket !

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Too short in the trunk. His pinstripe brown jacket might have provided a nice contrast--with a pink shirt, perhaps.

Space is the Place

[kalafa.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in your observations of decontextualised situations as being better (more appropriately "more") than the real thing such as in the case of the restaurant being "more" German and Germany. It'd be great to see you huddle them all together in one package. Perhaps even one tangible with illustrious parallels.

I have a close friend from Japan who is studying here in Washington with me. He once observed that I was much more Japanese than he and that I should cool off, so to speak. I didn't and still am not too sure how to feel about his comment. I momentarily took it as a compliment but still, I feel a little put off with the whole thing.


And you ARE from space.

[(Anonymous)]

americans have a severe blind spot: seeing that there are people in the world with radically different value systems. i don't know much about denver but can imagine that it's a good example of this willful ignorance.
-roddy
ps - interesting that it was kurt andersen interviewing, he's some sort of de facto american arts attache but i find his views to be usually conservative, although he's one of the few mainstream commentators in this country to talk about microsound in the 90's.

Denver...

[(Anonymous)]

as someone who lives in denver, i can relate to your general over-all take on the place. it can feel like mars sometimes to me, after moving here from the pacific northwest. but, like any other city, there are certainly some amazing small pockets of things going on. i would have loved to have shown you around so you could have gotten a better feel for the place. and i'm quite certain that the audience who would have appreciated your particular ideas and point of view is an audience who could not pay that crazy entry fee. like myself!
-brent

[lupoleboucher.livejournal.com]

Addressing a large audience is a real skill; it takes time, and a certain greasy charm, generally acquired in MBA school.

Gore probably heard something about Barabasi-Albert networks in his invention of the internet. Math dudes actually measure their degree of importance by how closely they are connected in the publishing network to Paul Erdos (who came up with the idea of social network theory). Once you know the graph theory, it all becomes pretty obvious. Even you probably have an Erdos number smaller than 7.

I'd say about a quarter of the country shares your opinion of Gore (the quarter that threatened to leave the country in 2004 if Kerry didn't win) & the rest see him as sort of mildly embarrassing to extremely distasteful, sort of the way Russians look at Gorbachov (or Americans look at Jimmy Carter). I see him as similar to William Jennings Bryan, myself.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

On Paul Erdos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

On the Erdos number:
http://web.aanet.com.au/image/erdos/

Gore, "The Great Commoner"? Who gets to be Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken?

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Hey!
“Down in Denver, down in Denver/All I did was die.”
Jack Kerouac - On The Road.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Someone called Dori moblogged a very fair assessment (http://dori3.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/10/aiga-next-frida.html) of my presentation's weaknesses and strengths:

"Momus (aka Nick Currie) was very cool but very incoherent in his presentation. He probably said some of the smartest things about design, philosophy, and culture that you never really got because the presentation was so tangled. Plus he was sporting a cool eye patch due to tainted contact lenses. The highlight quote that will go around the blogsphere, "The Japanese, gays, and graphic designers all play attention to texture. God is in the details."

Constructive Critisism

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I thought I saw a glimmer of self awareness in this entry, but then came the sweeping generalisations and justifications...

Your problem isn't that the room was full of Americans. or that your thought patterns "come mostly from a post-Marxist, post-structuralist European tradition" (Again, haughty claims with no clarification, what does that even mean?).

Your thought patterns are highly abstruse at times, which is a shame because you have a real passion to communicate with people and share your ideas which are always interesting if not always clear.

If it's a not a total lack of rationation dogging your talks, it's your habit of using esoteric word compounds like "ambivalent binary play" when "Consideration of opposing angles" works so much better and doesn't leave people scratching their head momentarily trying to translate what youre trying to say, if they can even translate it accurately at all.

If you ever want to communicate your ideas effectively, you need to stop talking like an artist. You need to stop treating your writings like your art (where playful ambiguity is desirable) and more as a vessel to effectively carry your message. If your ideas are sound, they don't need all the dressings of recondite words and references.

I think you allow yourself to get lost pseudo-intellectualism at times, but people are perhaps uneasy about questioning you on it lest they look stupid for not understanding the complexities of your ideas. I'm really not trying to be an arsehole about this but I couldn't think of any of way of putting it.

Psuedo-intellectualism: That only gay people, Japanese and designers really care about texture. Where do you get this stuff Nick? How would you go about even proving that anyway? "It's just my experience of these groups." right? That's psuedo-intellectualism, it's not rational.

Also, how everything in the world is connected, unexpectedly, to everything else is called "Pratītyasamutpāda" or "Dependant Arising" in Buddhist metaphysics. It's an incredibly enlightening aspect of buddhist philosophy and one of the main reasons I developed an interest in Zen.

Re: Constructive Critisism

[schmoooch.livejournal.com]

LOL

[mrobot.livejournal.com]

is this "post-Marxist, post-structuralist European tradition" really any more the way other clever Brits like you think either?

arent you supposed to be into bertrand russell or something

[xoskeleton.livejournal.com]

Yes! I agree exactly about "associational thinking" and the cultural disdain for it...
Is that your phrase? I thought I came up with it...when I noticed with shock how little comparison and association other peers were doing when going about thier thinking business (which is often in other ways superior...)

smell

[stuartmilgram.livejournal.com]

I just came across your live journal by accident, which is exciting because I've been interested in your music for a while.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I thought the idea of wifi signals being a kind man-made 'smell' was really interesting. We're doing a project in Birmingham (UK) next year that will probably be using wifi, and may refer to them as digital smells, if that's ok with you... now I just have to figure out if there's an RSS feed on this thing... Ta.
Stuart