How do you get a worthwhile education? I’ll talk with Michelle Glaw Haynes, a writer raised by fundamentalist Christians out of school and taught herself through a promiscuous relationship with books, Michael Brown, an interactive installation artist who grew up off the grid and taught himself to make audio-animatronic figures when he was young and of course you. What happens when we’re left to our own devices?
Excellent conversation and people guaranteed.
Mike is the only other solo performer I know who didn’t “lock” his scripts besides me. Back when he first toured his first big hit Doing Time At Amazon he told me it was difficult to get theatres to allow this. It’s something I do because my shows are interactive and they’re designed to shift every time in part based on who is there. The Agony And The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is the first script that Mike Daisey locked. He also gives it away for royalty-free performances Creative Commons style.
Locked. As in sure. Air tight. Even in his playbill asserting it is non-fiction. This is perhaps one of the reasons I didn’t go to see the show. But it is now the biggest story in solo performance / performance art (whatever handle it is people like to use to describe telling a story on a stage.) This is what I do ( although I spend a lot of time creating the space for others’ stories and participation). I have not stopped thinking about this revelation of Mike’s lying since I heard about it. And I imagine it will inform my own thinking about my own work for quite some time. The This American Life Retraction Episode in which he is grilled and dissembles and I would say performs, is absolutely riveting. And it is unscripted and all about Mike Daisey. Even when he does his best to say it’s not.
I just got an email from a conference that made me sad. It was only two sentences long. It was a dismissal in the guise of being a favour. It showed me that I didn’t matter to this person professionally anymore. We are done.
It hurt. It still hurts.
When I started out there years back I was just doing what was fun. I never thought of myself as in any kind of “in crowd.” Some people told me then that I was some kind of miniature celebrity in a miniature world. I didn’t see it. But I did feel like I belonged. I felt like I was with my people: the kind of people who were excited by ideas and who said to the new person who showed up at lunch “come on here and sit down.”
This is making me re-think how I learned that what I had to say mattered.
It mattered to me that what I had to say or who I brought together mattered to others. A conference or a show or an audience.
I’m having to learn over and over that what I have to say or do has to matter to me first. it sounds so simple and perhaps brain-dead to you that this is a thing to know or to learn. But it is for me.
In every world I’ve been in: artistic, entrepreneurial, or political everyone wants to know what people like. The truth is that even in the worlds that consider themselves “indie” they care. For me independent performing, publishing, creating business was about being able to follow the creative impulse you have. It was about an environment that preached and modeled empowerment.
You *can* do this.
You are allowed to do this.
I’m the kind of girl who needed to hear that. You can always tell who else needed to hear it: they’ll say it to anyone else, anytime.
Great encouragers of others always need encouragement.
People are always talking about themselves. Always. Whether we know we are talking to ourselves is another story.
I’ve never been a big triangulator of creative talent. Either I like your stories, your voice, your perspective, your jokes, your vulnerability or I don’t. I don’t like it because someone else does (no matter what any database, social media platform or popular kids table might say).
It never made a lot of sense to me to like someone because they were popular. That was true in junior high and it’s true when it comes to indie art too. I’m not interested in someone because they’re alternatively popular. Truth is, the people whose work I often love are often dismissed. But I don’t love someone’s voice or work *because* they’re dismissed. I love what resonates with my heart. That’s all.
It’s easy when I think about other peoples’ work: Justin Vivian Bond, Patti Smith, WhoopDeeDo.tv , Paul Mooney. The kind of folks I want to interview for my news upcoming subvert podcast (you can also follow @subverting on twitter). I’ll be subverting the SXSW conference live with impromptu gatherings. Add me on twitter and foursquare to join. I want to see what’s in your heart.
So why am I afraid of what’s in mine?
I just had my first story on Definitely Not the Opera, a This American Life-ish show on national radio in Canada and Sirius XM hosted by Sook-Yin Lee (Shortbus). This episode is themed: What Happens When You Pray? My story is about geek prayer and what happened to me during my life changing accident in 2006. I blogged about it some back then. The science-y blog I’m referring to in the story is Collision Detection belonging to Clive Thompson.
I’m really excited because I grew up listening to the CBC. I’ve had a few other appearances on it before on the programs Spark and Sounds Like Canada but this is a really great personal story. There’s no real equivalent in the US. Imagine NPR but one that literally the entire country listens to and loves.
This episode includes other Canadian artists like Diane Flacks and Kids in the Hall’s Scott Thompson. You’ll here my story at about minute 32. Listen here.
Doug Rushkoff honoured me by asking me to be one of the 10 people giving an opening provocation at the very inspiring conference he and Venessa Miemis convened the other day called #ContactCon. It’s was a conference focussed on what people could actively do to concretely fulfill the promise of the Net.
Our role as opening provokers was to give people some inspiration about what the Net needs. I knew I would focus on emotional and a connection on people since that’s what my performance work centres on. I only had four minutes to make an impression and move the room.
I also knew that the other speakers, like Scott Heiferman, (founder of meetup) and Eli Pariser, (founder of MoveOn) whom are all wonderful and whose work I admire weren’t performers. And while people spoke about the importance of making the Net human I wanted to make the room feel human as I made my own points. I wanted to shift or sculpt the social space in the room. Later that day, Doug called it “repasting the room” when he thanked me for my performance
Usually, if I had more time, I’d then use the openness and emotional connection in the room after what I did to shine focus on people in the room and to draw their stories out. I explore some of how I do this in shows, and how these “mechanics” of  conversation or tummeling work  in this other talk I gave at Google and teach people how to do it in UnPresenting.
And some people asked me afterwards as I discussed social and emotional engagement if its necessary to be heavy and sad to pull a focus like that. No I don’t believe so. I think you have to be genuine. You have to work with what’s truthful for you right then. Believe me, it’s a lot more fun for me when it’s hilarious. In time, this story will also be hilarious. At least some of the time.
I’ve written all this to give some context as to why I did what I did in this provocation. It was a chosen performance. Usually this opening up of the room happens in a performance or “talk” of mine. Because there was no time for it I got responses all day long, many in the bathroom from other women (a sure sign you’ve hit a nerve). I choose to open myself up and be vulnerable and honest in these moments but it can be tiring. It’s been a difficult and profound year for me personally, a year of biblical kinds of loss. I’ve moved from place to place with one suitcase for over a year. I’m ready for home and settledness.
This video doesn’t give context. I’m not sure it conveys how it felt in the room before, during or after I spoke. I did shift the feeling in the room which was my goal. I’m proud of that. I’m proud that I can be publicly honest about something difficult. I do know that institutions, even the ones we helped to build, fail. And I do know that outsourcing a sense of self to them also fails us.
Occupy Wall Street points to the institutional failure and shift that has only just begun. I am learning every day how to self-create and collectively create what is needed to feel home in a life of change. This is a huge opportunity for those who make online and off. The goal is not to have something static forever. I’ve learned the hardest way that we really don’t have control. Â That kind of making is an illusion. We want to be ourselves and feel safe and feel together. I know I do.
Thanks to my friend Brad King for his example and encouragement.
You can buy the routine I mention MSFT=XIANS,APPL=JEWS here.
There’s a great Toronto-based independent design studio run by Emily Horne and Tim Maly called Border Town that I gave a guest talk in a little while ago. I also helped guide them and their participants through the Niagara Fallses, Canadian and American. I’m sure you don’t write the plural of Niagara Falls like that but I don’t care. I like the idea of Fallses.
They asked me to write something to coincide with their upcoming exhibit in Detroit.
I wrote this in 2011, I think: My story of growing up near the second greatest disappointment in American married life,” Niagara Falls.
______________________________
Niagara Falls.
“People live there?” Forget living. I grew up there. Like an accident at the side of the road, it’s a place everyone knows about but no one can imagine staying put in.
Most border towns are known as afterthoughts; only a place because there’s been so much passing through. Niagara Falls the town has Niagara Falls the spectacle. It has natural beauty and power which were famous when natural beauty and power were celebrity. Then it was the ˜honeymoon capital of the world” when your honeymoon was the first time you were officially allowed to have sex. Then it became a place to be sure you got a souvenir from. It went from check list box on the to do list of the very cultured and moneyed, to coital, to consumptive. To live beside all this, within the man behind the curtain is to watch us make a place up. You can see the audience see and make the show. Because all tourism and spectacle is brought to the place by the people who visit it.
Meanwhile, The water never changed.
I was the kind of kid who couldn’t wait to get out of my small town. And it was both inspiring and extra cruel that the whole world came to visit where I lived. But they got to leave and no one would take me with them.
They’d ask questions like, “What time do they turn off the Falls?” and How do you say ‘Mother’ in Canadian?
It’s not that the tourists were all that sophisticated. They were just from somewhere else, whether that was Ohio or Japan, and that was enough for me.
Growing up in Niagara Falls, I sometime worked in my grandparents’ variety store on Clifton Hill. Clifton Hill was a steep, near the Falls themselves and lined with The Guinness Book of World Records, The Criminals Hall of Fame and Houdini’s, arcades, fudge shops and Rumors, the one dance club in town.
It was also the place for Cabbage Night partying (the place to get wasted before and after pulling pranks on the night before Halloween) and the place for the annual initiation night for the high schools fraternities and sororities. They’d all drink a bunch, wear crazy outfits and have to do things like put their hands in a toilet while blindfolded and squish up what they weren’t told was actually a banana.
On Clifton Hill anyone could see lights and tourists and the border. For me, there was also Richard, the guy who sold tours from a ramshackle wooden stand outside the store in which I worked. Richard was scrawny and had a mustache that was scrawny too. It went out to the sides and then tried to make it down to his chin. He wore dirty white pants, a little white Captain’s hat and a hook for a hand. He’d come in to buy cigarettes and always ask me to light the first one for him.
To me, Niagara Falls is Richard, Italian bakeries and a big guy in the high school hall cornering you to buy tickets to his cousin Louie’s Semi. Semi-Formal dances that happened at Polish Halls or Club Italia and ended, supposedly, at one of the plethora of cheesy, out-of-the-way motels. At least that’s what I heard. It was all very risky and seedy to me back then, immersed in good girl rule noticing and nerd-hiding at home with a book.
It was a grimy time and place and I felt that most when I recently returned to give a tour to the Border Town project. Everything I remembered most was gone. Where was Cyanamid, the giant chemical plant with the coloured smoke that my Uncle played softball in front of? What about the Shreddies cereal plant? Where was the resentment of small town life you used to be able to smell in the air? Where was the barber who drove a Ferrari and all the other Mafia legends? Where were all the prostitutes at the corner of Bridge and Erie streets? Where were the head shops full of bongs and black and white Rush concert baseball shirts? Where were the .38 Special tunes coming out of someone’s Camaro?
And what happened to downtown? It used to have a department store and lots of shops, many run by merchants in our miniscule Jewish community. But even after the mall on the edge of town took care of most of that, there were at least strippers. Where did they go? They used to be near the train station and the downtown and the river and the border. Now there are casinos and high-rise hotels just down the river road and I guessed theyve zoned it all away.
You see it all around you / Good lovin going bad / And usually it’s too late when you / realize what you had
When I got my driver’s license I would go “over the river” as we called it, but not to drink like everyone else; I went to an even shabbier Niagara Falls to buy the Sunday New York Times.
I would pore through the Arts section. And the Book Review. I wanted to be in bigger world. A more sophisticated one. And I found it. I left and lived in New York, Chicago, LA and mostly San Francisco. I was part of the scene when the web really got going. I traveled. But when I returned to Niagara I was surprised to see that I missed the grime and pollution and seedier stuff the most. Even the legends of mafia look corporate now. It doesn’t seem like the place anymore when you could find out who stole the tires off your car when you went to a local park and then had to buy them back, which happened to us when we went tobogganing at Firemans’ Park with my cousins.
The world has plenty of spectacle. The biggest gift Niagara Falls gave me moves with me. I’m still liminal: Canadian and now American too. I’m not really great at being any one thing. My look, what I do, how I see the world, it all sits on the border with my favourite word: both.
I just came across this post which I wrote about a year ago when I was near the culmination of finally getting a central website up at heathergold.com, something that I stressed about and thought about for *years.* I’m posting it in the event you may find it helpful. And because I recently gave a talk at WordCamp (the annual WordPress conference from Automattic) about my view about the need for changing blogging tools. It’s interesting to see how much further my feelings about blogging platform needs have gone only a year after I was about to end my insanely long struggle to have a “proper” central site / blog under my name.
A couple of key notes from the performance/talk Tools for Tummeling in the age of Google +
(but it’s pretty funny and includes some awesome 9 and 6 year old sisters dropping some serious web knowledge, so it’s worth a watch)
• blogs are still brochure-like and one-to-many-ish which seem static and unsatisfying in the era of social activity streams. People are in “social media’ to be with each other. How do we create a “with” space and feeling on a blog?
• the emotional interfaces of blogs and the web haven’t progressed farther than the era of an 1997 Site Under Construction animated gif. We have emoticons. We can do a lot better than that.
• How do you make people comfortable on your site and create a sense of space? How do I do the equivalent of offering you a piece of cake here?
• How do you let people know you are with them even when you are not speaking and commenting
• How do you know when someone is listening to you?
• People speak and express differently when they know they are being listened to and cared about.
Extreme Web MakeOver + Under (written 9/21/10)
Have you ever dealt with something so overwhelming and confusing that you just gave up? That was me and my web sites. For years they’ve felt like a jewelry box full of knotted and tangled chains. If only I could get it together, I know there’s something valuable there.
I’ve been embarrassed and annoyed with myself. You can imagine how productive that has been.
So now I’m coming out with it. Being open and vulnerable and authentic is something I speak about, practice in my art and believe in. It’s always worked for me. So I’ll be sharing the journey.
And I finally think it’s possible to conquer the confusion. I’ve got a great team shaping up and I decided, as I often do, that the most helpful thing to do would be to own up to it publicly and share the journey with all of you. I’m not the only person with old web sites that don’t quite work now, or abandoned technical ideas making things difficult. Perhaps there’s something in this that will be helpful to you and perhaps you’ll have some good ideas. Perhaps we’ll discover something else
Maybe the mess isn’t your site, but you.
Ah, how can you tell the dancer from the dance?
I create in many different ways, often spontaneously on stage, and speak to many different “audiences.” I might keynote for Internet professionals at Web 2.0, I might be bringing together students at a southern college that’s been having hate speech problems performing my show Cookie, I might be giving advice to queer folks about coming out, I might just rant about Hillary and Obama running for President.
But as the always insightful Merlin Mann said to me “anyone is only one Google search away from other parts of you.” That’s our current version of Whitman’s insight that “I contain multitudes.”
So I will be combining, and organizing, my work and information about me for the many different people who are interested in my work. I am not my keywords.
Why focus on a web site in 2010? Aren’t you on twitter?
Wired Magazine recently questioned the future of the web itself. At a time when the shiniest attention is going to iPhone and iPad apps and Facebook and other “activity streams” which are certainly unmoored from a central place or site, why do this? I’ve been tweeting way more than blogging. Why should I go back to focussing on my web site(s)? Just as some are declaring email bankruptcy, shouldn’t i just declare web site bankruptcy?
There are 3 good reasons:
1. I’ll be able to better find and share all the work I’ve made.
I have lots of writing and years and years of great video and audio content from all kinds of shows, including: stand-up, Cookie (my first interactive show in which I’ve baked over 25,000 chocolate chip cookies with audiences all over the US) and my deep love the Heather Gold Show (soon to be renamed subvert w heather gold and based on subvert.com), a talk show in which the guests are there to spark a conversation with everyone. Don’t you want to see Maria Bamford riff ridiculously on her depression or see me call out Julia Allison in the audience and have her sit on my lap when she booed then Valleywag editor Owen Thomas on my infamous SXSW Gossip panel? How about punk rock legend Lynnee Breedlove connecting with Darfur survivor Gadet Riek? I have amazing moments but it’s hard to share them if they’re just going to be like another tangled necklace in the jewelry box.
2. I’ll make more work.
I need a sense of space in order to create. Working with designers at Wolff Olins years ago made me conscious that blank space is essential for me to make something new. I need to know that something will have a place to go. Knowing where something will go and that it has it’s place to go helps free my mind.
3. It’ll be easier to find my stuff and me and much easier to give me money.
Like many artists I work to support myself through my creative work. In my case that includes speaking about what I learn through my art and teaching it to others and applying it to business (which needs art the most). I need a clear central place where people can find my work and out about me, get to know me, hire me and access and buy my work. I want to get to know you too and I’ve got twitter and facebook and podcast chats and live shows to help me do that. Perhaps that will happen on my site too. But not until something simple and basic works first.
Bonus Reason: The open web matters. I don’t care how many streams I end up creating or that my stuff will travel and be posted all over the web (I will creative commons license most all of it), all those links need to go somewhere. Tummeling, which I do and speak, teach and podcast about, Â is all about making connections and the best way for me to make connections between different kinds of work that I’ve done is through a central site.
The obstacle of being early
I started a web presence back in 1996. Like many I knew I was blogging before it was called that and before there was handy software to make it happen. So some kind friends who’d begun a small (now defunct) web agency developed a custom publishing tool for me to make subvert.com possible. (Thanks Eric Lawrence and Dan Eckam / eyephonic) Unlike Ev or Ben and Mena, it didn’t occur to me that they should sell this tool to everyone. But I have no right to feel bad. I can always listen to Justin Hall‘s Great Opportunities I Missed at my 2000 Internet Roast)
I can’t tell you how long it took to get all the stuff I’d published into real blogging software. (Thanks Paul Schreiber). It’s easy to get attached to the tool you’ve used, but it’s easier to use the open tools lots more people are using *now.*
I wrote this as part of a grant application in 2004 I think. Maybe 2005. There’s a phrase in here I come back to again and again to describe what is missing in many situations and what I’m looking to change, the intimacy I want to make and the conditions for it I want us all to make and have:
There’s is a big difference between a strip club and sexual intimacy. I think we’re after the business difference too. How often are pr/ SEC filings, marketing and branding and advertising an exercise in stripping? Even when showing everything, allowing in/exchanging nothing.
Thanks to Tony Comstock for pulling this bit out and inspiring me to think that perhaps it’s worth sharing all of this. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
(one small note: I plan to bring the Heather Gold Show back as subvert with heather gold sometime this year. If you’re interested in working on producing the podcast let me know.)
Interactive performance
Is one way to describe what I do. Other terms I’ve used include freestyle comedy, story DJ, interactive comedy, and human filter. It’s tough mapping language to experience and feeling.
I use personal storytelling, humour, improvisation, conversation, communal activity and other techniques to create a relatively quick sense of intimacy and connection in the room. In traditional theatre the story is the means. I’m exploring ways to make it the end as well, so that the catharsis is not somewhere over there on stage but inside of everyone in the room. What if the performance were not about someone who is a baker, but is unfolding as I bake with everyone right now?
This entails adapting to the audience and encouraging their participation and energy as a factor in the show. It means spending as much time designing conditions likely to create a live experience as it does scripting. It also means being as genuine and authentically ones self as possible. There are a host of little tricks and techniques I’m learning as this path unfolds. For example, I’ve found that if I “go first†it makes it much easier for others to open up as well. This authenticity means means being imperfect. In public.
The business world more than any other has, sometimes silently and sometimes in memos, asked us to leave our whole selves outside the door and bring only the “efficient†piece of our minds to the task at hand. It takes a whole person, especially the ungraphed and un-Powerpointed parts of our humanity to have fun, to play, to be open. Those things are necessary for real community and creativity to occur.
From The Law Project proposal for my next solo show
Because I write the show by improvising with an audience, I cannot know the threads that will be strongest and remain at the end of the process. My work aims to create live, intimate community by exploring universal subjects that connect us. My interactive plays create community through the performance: To use humour, personal storytelling, and most of all the audience themselves to create a deep sense of connection and inclusion. Unlike most stand-up comics or audience participation shows, I never make comedy at the expense of the audience. I create a space for them to shine.
In Cookie I bake chocolate chip cookies with the audience. In The Law Project I plan to teach law with the audience as I explore my own journey through law school. This will increase the challenge intellectually and emotionally for me as a playwright and performer, as I work to find a way to make the abstract tangible and the theoretical emotionally resonant.
I write by talking / improving and riffing in a long series of workshops that always involve some kind of audience. Cookie was the result of many performances, and I’m interested in creating experiences that challenge folks as well as bring them together.
The commons is shrinking quickly in this nation, with conversations, academic and otherwise, happening more and more between folks who already agree with each other, listening to more of what they already think. Performance (and the law) have the opportunity to strengthen bonds as they can bring folks together who are di”erent, or already in disagreement. “Creating the space” has everything to do with whether or not we’ll truly be able to explore disagreement, or just talk at each other.
I think that the rule of law needs to be seriously examined in a moment in which western cultures believe that it is what makes them unique, better and free . What does rule of law really mean? Is it as powerful as story or is it the arena in which we craft and choose which stories we will collectively live by?
My work builds on the solo performance tradition created by monologist Spalding Gray. Like Josh Kornbluth, who built on Spalding Gray’s work, I use improvisation to create a play that feels alive. But my work focuses on bringing the form to a place that excites today’s audiences. This means building in interactive threads and moments. This means not locking the script completely. This means involving the audience very literally in the show. Video games, then music and now television are all involving interactive elements in part because people are interested in each other. Performance has always been a way of having a unifying collective experience. I’ve been taking elements and principles I learned from a variety of worlds, including the Net and applying them to live performance. And its an ongoing lesson. I try to approach performance like software. I don’t expect it to be completely finished and I know that I will learn something new from the audience every time.
Live performance has an opportunity to do what our Congress, towns and perhaps our real courts are failing to do: Be a public space in we can be whole together. This is theatre as new commons.
From The Heather Gold Show – my live talk show
I don’t force the specific topic of the show but let it grow organically from my lead guest (Thinker/represents light). I believe that passion is a requirement for a meaningful conversation, and that everything is like a wheel: if you can introduce any idea from the hub, then it will connect with any spoke. To curate guests, I choose people who will be able to give very different takes on the same subject, from the Entertainer (represents wine) and Doer (represents bread). These guests are always extremely diverse in terms of background, identity and point of view, but the topic, atmosphere, humour and vulnerability I share and connections I make allow all the guests and audience to come together. This means the show is about living the questions with the guests and everyone there.
From Open Source Management or Live! Corporate! Blogging!
There’s is a big difference between a strip club and sexual intimacy. I think we’re after the business difference too. How often are pr/ SEC filings, marketing and branding and advertising an exercise in stripping? Even when showing everything, allowing in/exchanging nothing.
From Design for Conversation, my business talk/experience
Why do people who make interactive experiences and focus on relationship in their business, have conferences in which the only time people interact is in the halls? How do you design for conversation? What are the qualitative factors in allowing it to happen?
What opens people up? What assumptions am I working from?
• inclusion
• everyone is welcome
• other people are funny
• its great if other folks get laughs too
• story is how we create meaning
• anyone can tell a story in the right conditions
• everyone is interesting when they’re present / authentic
• vulnerability is necessary for connection
• reaching the people on the edge will have an energetic domino effect on everyone else.
I welcome your thoughts and feelings.
Update 4/6/2013 Many thanks to BoingBoing for linking to this post in connection with the production of my interactive show “I Look Like An Egg, but I Identify As A Cookie” 4/8 and 4/9/2013 at Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Tickets for that are here. I learned a great deal of this stuff in making “Cookie.” Since I initially wrote this post I’ve done a fair amount of speaking and some workshop teaching and speaking coaching and a podcast related to how to create the conditions for conversation or “tummelling.” If you’re interested the workshop and talks at Google and Web 2.0 and Ignite, you’ll find much of it here. The podcast is called TummelVision and was done with Deb Schultz and Kevin Marks. It’s here.
My original How to Tummel Google talk, among other things, led David Hood to bring me to Australia where I spoke at this conference. Gathering 11 was a mix of personal growth, social media and thinking about the changing economy. Unfortunately it cuts off all the crowdwork I did at the beginning in which, I killed I tell you. I also implored the room with this nugget: “If someone can’t tell you you’re full of shit, it’s not a conversation” Politely deferring in public doesn’t not a conversation make.
I enjoyed teaching an UnPresenting workshop there and will be doing more in San Francisco soon after I speak at WordCamp SF. 8/15 is sold out to Automattic (makers of WordPress) but there are still slots available on 8/17 and early registration priced tix too!. Buy em now.
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