David Byrne's Journal

03.05.10: Dream — The Art Trap

2010-03-05T17:46:00-05:00

C and I went to a VIP opening at the New Museum. Almost everyone was wearing black and almost everyone was as old or older than us. The art was, well, some good, some not so good, some familiar, and some new — and most of it seemed a little awe-inspiring. Almost nothing was on an intimate, personal scale — which I found somewhat overwhelming, maybe even intimidating.

That night (or was it the night after?) I had a dream.

I was in bed with C in a hotel room and the view out the window was of some large steel and glass buildings. Tucked among them was a kind of massive radio telescope dish sunken into the ground. (A bit like the Arecibo one in Puerto Rico.)

Only in this case I knew, as one does in dreams, that this wasn’t a harmless radio telescope but rather a death ray of some sort. We were in North Korea — maybe — or it was definitely some foreign country where such a thing as a death ray might be possible, though the slick buildings didn’t seem very North Korean… more like downtown Houston.

Two hotel staff enter, pushing a large contraption that fills almost the entire room. They tell us that it is a “gift.” Its smooth white surface has lights and switches and things that look like back scratchers sticking out. It’s somehow lovely and entertaining. The most significant features are a series of holes in the device — significant because they’re just big enough for a person to fit in, though how you’d get in there is a puzzle as they’re midway up the side of the thing.

I know, however, that this is no ordinary gift — I announce that this is an “Art Trap” and that we should be very, very careful. Somehow I know that if one gets too involved with this thing, with its seductive lights and displays, one would magically find oneself in one of the holes, squeezed and stuck tight. The temptation to fiddle with it up close is great, as the thing is truly a bizarre wonder. We get close to it, examine it, and when the dream ends I’m not captured — though that could still happen easily, in the blink of an eye. I laugh at how obvious it all seems after attending the VIP opening.

02.14.10: Valentine’s Day

2010-02-14T11:43:00-05:00

TED talk — Creation in Reverse

I did a TED talk in Long Beach. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design and it’s a conference that was started some decades ago by Silicon Valley types to essentially bring part of the world to their doorstep.

From the TED website:

“TED was born in 1984 out of the observation by Richard Saul Wurman of a powerful convergence between Technology, Entertainment and Design. The first TED included demos of the newly released Macintosh computer and Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind.”

(It was originally held in Monterey, a beautiful seaside escape just over the hills from Silicon Valley.) I suspect that the valley geeks and entrepreneurs didn’t usually get out much — they hardly ever even make it up to San Francisco! — so inviting innovators from around the world to come to them was a smart idea.

Here is Mandelbrot doing a return engagement this year, in reverse color.

It’s gone well beyond technology, entertainment and design by now, but still has a bit of a nerdy, techie vibe. I’d been watching their free video podcasts of various TED talks for years, and never really thought of attending until within the past year or two some other musicians who had been in the past all said, “You HAVE to go.”

Luckily, I got invited to do one of their talks this year, which saved me from worrying about the costs (this time, at least). The lineup is mind-boggling. TED talks are famously restricted to 18 minutes (or less — some folks are only given 3 minutes!... and some only got 1 minute!!) and they are very strict about it. I watched one elderly scientist almost get the hook as he exceeded his time allotment.

The time limit is a brilliant strategy — it forces us talkers to be concise, and the audience also knows that if they’re less than thrilled or stimulated, a new topic and speaker will be along in a few minutes. Being concise is one thing, but the time limit also conveniently means one has to stay “on message,” as the Cheney regime referred to it. In that time frame one can really just present one idea — and often it seems like just the inkling or introduction to a new idea was what was being presented.

Months ago I went to meet the TED folks at their New York offices after I was invited to participate. I was being vetted. I’ve done a few talks in the last few years — on bicycles and cities and Powerpoint — but they seemed to want something that pulled in my musical life. So, I mentioned to them that there was another talk, one about music in context, that I’d only done once — and I believed it could include musical examples and personal anecdotes. That seemed to satisfy them, though I said if they had doubts they could uninvite me, and that would be fine, no offense taken.

I practiced by talking on my subject over the last couple of months — at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg, Bell House in Park Slope, and at Bowery Ballroom as part of the Stories in High Fidelity series. I never got it down to the requisite 18 minutes at those venues, but I did refine and re-order the thing quite a bit. I got some feedback and some beers.

I was terrified going in front of the TED crowd — they never boo, but they’re a pretty heavy-duty lot. Walking in I glimpsed Daniel Dennett, the author whose amazing talks I’ve seen on the podcasts. Later I caught sight of über geeks like Bill Gates (who talked about a new kind of nuclear reactor), Google founder Sergey Brin (who was interviewed about the China mess) and Temple Grandin (who wore old school Western wear all the time)… and while I was talking on the phone during a break Will Smith walked by, accosted by two nerds. Some of the major science speakers sported science fashion straight out of central casting, while others were beautifully surprising in the disconnect between their appearance and their deep skill sets. The attendees were predominantly male.

The conference has evolved, as I mentioned — and with all the money that is now connected to and surrounding the tech world, many talks almost seemed like pitches for support in developing the speaker’s new medical miracle, for example. Your potential funders are probably sitting right in front of you. Thankfully, not too much overt hustling was in evidence, but there was lots of business card exchanging. Many talks seemed to be about new medical or other technologies that can be of use in the developing world. One can see that the Gates Foundation and many many others would naturally emerge from this milieu.

It’s not all science. There are musical acts as well — they play a few songs interspersed between the talks on the wisdom of whores and mathematical models of alternate universes. Thomas Dolby is the one-man house band, and this year he was joined by NY string quartet Ethel. Other guest acts were Jake Shimabukuro, ukulele virtuoso; Andrew Bird; and Natalie Merchant, who appropriately integrated a slide show into her short set. I sat in with Thomas and Ethel for an edited version of “Nothing But Flowers,” a song well suited to the venue where Gore first did his climate change talk (he was there too).

Sarah Silverman’s shock comedy routine wasn’t exactly well received by all… but overall most attendees seemed to be enthralled by the majority of talks. Naturally there were a few high points and spontaneous standing ovations (I didn’t get one), and those tend to spread around the web very quickly. The Jamie Oliver rant about American eating habits is online already. (There’s an amazing video clip included in it of West Virginia school kids who can’t identify common vegetables.)

There wasn’t much time for biking around — there wasn’t much time for anything beyond listening — but I did manage to rent one and ride down the beach bike path. Really lovely, though not a very viable means of commuting. Long Beach has oil wells in the harbor; larger offshore drilling rigs can be seen in the distance. The ones close to the beach were disguised to look like skinny condos or office buildings, as if that would somehow be less offensive than looking at an oil derrick.

Anyway, here’s a slightly expanded version of my talk, minus the musical excerpts.

Creation in Reverse

What I'm going to talk about is an insight I've had about creation. That insight is that context largely determines what kind of music is written. Maybe the analogy applies to other forms of creation as well — painting, sculpture, programming or performance — or at least the shape of them.

That doesn't sound like such a big insight, but it's actually backwards from what I perceive to be conventional wisdom — which is that creation emerges out of some interior emotion or from an upwelling of passion that inevitably and must find an outlet. This is the romantic notion of how creative work comes to be. Here are the lyrics to a new song by the group One Republic: “I need another story/Something to get off my chest…When a situation rises/Just write it into an album.”

It doesn’t even rhyme, but more than that I think it’s based on a mistaken assumption.

I do think that despite the fact that this old notion of how creation comes into being is mistaken, passion is inevitably present in most work. Just because the form things take is self- or (in the case of my examples here) architecturally-restricted, and just because our response to a given context can be viewed as opportunistic, it doesn’t mean that creation is therefore cold and heartless. Those dark and emotional materials usually find a way in — and the tailoring process is largely unconscious. Emotional content is formed and shaped to fit the available context and circumstance instinctively. So, the order of the process is the reverse from what is often assumed: the consideration of the vessel comes first, and that which fills it comes afterwards. Most of the time we’re not even aware of this tailoring we do. Opportunity is often the mother of invention. The emotional story — “something to get off my chest” — still gets told, but its form is guided by contextual restrictions.

Paintings are created that fit and look incredibly good on the white walls of galleries. They might not look quite as good in your living room, filled with furniture and AV gear. Music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not both). The architecture, the space, the platform, the software, in a sense “makes” the art. After art or music succeeds in a space, more similar venues are built to accommodate more production of similar sounding or looking pieces, but that happens later, after the form has been established. I sense that this mostly internalized tailoring process applies to everything, but I'll use music as my example, as people will believe I know something about that area.

Here is the room where some of the music I wrote as a young man was first heard.

David Byrne's Journal

03.05.10: Dream — The Art Trap

02.14.10: Valentine’s Day

02.01.10: The Good News and The Bad News and the Good news

01.01.10: Mérida

12.13.09: The Limits of Multiculturalism

12.12.09: Art Funding or Arts Funding

11.26.09: Thanksgiving

11.14.09: And the Winner Is…

11.10.09: Sintra — A Mystical Home in the Clouds

11.09.09: Estoril, Portugal — The Future, the Past, the Present and…