A puzzle pirate from Stockholm, or space
Oct. 13th, 2007 06:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusMy 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."
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."
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nick's design
Date: 2007-10-13 01:04 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2007-10-13 01:23 pm (UTC)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.
Re: nick's design
Date: 2007-10-13 03:41 pm (UTC)Re: nick's design
Date: 2007-10-13 07:06 pm (UTC)