The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City
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The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City
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Overview
Should neighborhoods change? Is wearing a suit a good way to quit smoking? Why do people think that if you do one thing, you're against something else? Is monogamy a trick? Why isn't making the city more fun for you and your friends a super-noble political goal? Why does a computer last only three years? How often should you see your parents? How should we behave at parties? Is marriage getting easier? What can spam tell us about the world?
Misha Glouberman's friend and collaborator, Sheila Heti, wanted her next book to be a compilation of everything Misha knew. Together, they made a list of subjects. As Misha talked, Sheila typed. He talked about games, relationships, cities, negotiation, improvisation, Casablanca, conferences, and making friends. His subjects ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. But sometimes what had seemed trivial began to seem important—and what had seemed important began to seem less so.
The Chairs Are Where the People Go is refreshing, appealing, and kind of profound. It's a self-help book for people who don't feel they need help, and a how-to book that urges you to do things you don't really need to do.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429968645 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 07/05/2011 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 811,794 |
| File size: | 431 KB |
About the Author
MISHA GLOUBERMAN is a performer, facilitator, and artist who lives in Toronto.
SHEILA HETI is the author of three books of fiction: The Middle Stories, Ticknor, and How Should a Person Be?. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney's, n + 1, and The Guardian. She regularly conducts interviews for The Believer.
Misha Glouberman is a performer, facilitator, and artist who lives in Toronto. She is the author of The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City.
Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York deemed one of the "New Classics" of the twenty-first century. She was named one of the "New Vanguard" by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto.
Read an Excerpt
The Chairs are Where the People Go
How to Live, Work, and Play in the City
By Misha Glouberman, Sheila Heti
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2011 Misha Glouberman and Sheila HetiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6864-5
CHAPTER 1
People's Protective Bubbles Are Okay
I hear people complain that, for instance, in this city, people don't say hi on the street or make eye contact on the subway. And people try to remedy this problem by doing public art projects that are meant to rouse the bourgeoisie from their slumber. But that's ridiculous! It's perfectly reasonable for people not to want to see your dance performance when they are coming home from work. People are on the subway because they're getting from one place to another, and for all you know, they're coming from a job that involves interacting with lots and lots of people, and going to a home where there's a family where they're going to interact with lots more people. And the subway's the one place where they can have some quiet time, get some reading done, not have to smile, not have to make eye contact. That's what a city is: a city is a place where you can be alone in public, and where you have that right. It's necessary to screen people out. It would be overwhelming if you had to perceive every single person on a crowded subway car in the fullness of their humanity. It would be completely paralyzing. You couldn't function. So don't try to fix this. There is no problem.
CHAPTER 2How to Make Friends in a New City
If you're just finishing school — maybe you're in your early twenties, maybe you're moving to a new city — you need to make friends. The very most important thing to know is that this isn't easy. It's really easy to make friends when you're a child, and it's really easy to make friends in high school and in college. And for a lot of people, I think, it's a real shock to discover that making friends doesn't take care of itself in adulthood. When you come to university you're crammed together with a couple of thousand people who are around your age and who share a bunch of stuff in common with you, and most important, are at that very same moment also looking for new friends. In this sort of situation, it would take a lot of conscious effort to end up not having friends. But adult life isn't like that. You may move to a new city, maybe for a job that doesn't easily put you into contact with a lot of people with whom you have much in common. So what that means is that it's work, and maybe for the first time in your life you have to actually take making friends on as a project. I knew so many people around that stage of life who suddenly found themselves isolated and couldn't understand why, and had never thought of making friends as something they had to bring conscious effort to.
If you see making friends as a project, you can understand that there will be efforts and costs and risks. You have to go to functions that you don't exactly feel like going to, you have to stick your neck out and make gestures that are embarrassing or can make you feel vulnerable. You'll have to spend time with people who initially seem interesting but then turn out not to be. But all those things are okay if you see them as the costs involved in a project.
It's useful to identify what you like to do, because friends are the people with whom you can do those things. So if you like to cook, you might take a cooking class and meet people who are interested in cooking. Or if what you like to do is go drink in bars, then find people who want to drink in bars with you. If you like to watch television and make fun of it, find other people who want to do that. It's useful to remember that friendship needs an activity associated with it.
If you're the ambitious sort, you can try to create your own world around you, and maybe have a party at your house every two weeks. I think Andy Warhol's grandmother gave him similar advice. This gets you more than friends — it can create a whole community. I'll say it takes a certain kind of person to do this, though. But if you can do it — if you can put yourself at the center of something — it really works.
When I came to Toronto, here's what I liked to do: I liked drinking in bars and I liked thinking about the Internet. This was at a time when thinking about the Internet wasn't so popular, but drinking in bars was, so I just started a club, and I put out the word, and I invited other people. I was the only person at my organization at the time who was really interested in thinking about the Internet. It was at a time when sort of every organization hired one person to be their web guy. So there were all these lonely, isolated web guys scattered around the city, and we started a biweekly bar night. I was completely new in town, but just by starting something like that, you really put yourself in the center of all kinds of things. Being a host — it's a really super-valuable service that a lot of people are disinclined to do, and if you can do it, it's a great way to meet people.
CHAPTER 3The Uniqlo Game
There's an online game which I love — from, of all places, a Japanese clothing company called Uniqlo. The game has a fast-paced pop culture feel to it. There is a grid of Uniqlo logos on the screen, and you manipulate them in different ways. You can make big ones or little ones. You can chop them up or merge them together. You can make them disappear. It's a multiplayer game. All they tell you about the players is their sign-in name and what country they're from, so you and someone in France and someone in Korea and someone in the United States, all of indeterminate age and gender, are manipulating these shared sets of blocks.
The genius of the game, to me, is that there's no chat area. There's no way you can send messages to the other players. You can only communicate by dragging these logos around. It's so interesting in the context of that to think, Can I make this person in Korea like me? Can I flatter this person in France by echoing the moves that they're making on this grid? Can I do something terribly mischievous in a way that won't be perceived as hostile, or can I do something hostile in a way that will be?
I like playing this game a lot.
CHAPTER 4Going to the Gym
One idea that came up a lot around the time I was in college was that some ideas or opinions were social constructions. So, for instance, if you could show that ideals of female beauty were something that society had created, then you could also show that these ideals aren't something that people naturally feel, but rather they're a brainwashing tool created by society — in this case to perpetuate the patriarchal hegemony.
Another example of this: I read a book a little while ago which made the point that while we worry a lot about status, maybe we shouldn't, since after all, the things that are associated with status in our society aren't associated with status in other societies right now, and weren't associated with status historically in other societies, so really it's all arbitrary. Today, being thin and having strong analytic skills are valued, whereas in another society being a fast runner would have been important, or in another one, obesity was a sign of status. The author sort of concludes, Why worry?
But all that stuff's crazy! Just because something's socially constructed, doesn't mean it's not real. I mean, we can show that every society has a different set of standards for feminine beauty, and that every society has different sets of standards for status, but it's equally remarkable that every society does have standards for feminine beauty, and does have standards for status. We're humans. We exist in societies. We create cultures. And these cultures may be different from each other, with different beliefs, but they're who we are. There's not something more "real" to discover about us if you take all that away. A human who doesn't exist in a culture isn't somehow more true. In fact, I think a human who doesn't exist in a culture — that's not what a human is. I exist in the culture that I exist in, and I can know that other cultures see status in different ways, but I will be swayed by the ideas of status that affect mine. I can know that other cultures have different standards of feminine beauty and still be attracted by the standards of feminine beauty that exist in mine.
This doesn't seem any more shocking to me than finding a passage of literature written in English beautiful but not a passage written in a language I can't read. I don't feel like my impression of beauty in the English passage is destroyed by someone pointing out that the correlation between these words and the objects they describe isn't actually real — that other societies use different words for the same things, and that the use of one symbol to represent a certain object or sound is at base somewhat arbitrary. I'm okay with that.
I went to the gym pretty regularly for a long time, and it always felt so crazy to me. The gym is like the meeting point of all these different things that are emblematic of our time. It looks like the shopping mall and the factory, and it's where our crazy desire to exert ourselves and work hard meets our crazy desire to be young forever, along with our crazy confusion about our appetites, and our imagining that we can subject everything to rational, super-mechanistic processes. Fifty years from now, if you wanted to pick something that encapsulates the old days of the early twenty-first century, you'd show the gym.
For a while I was kind of embarrassed to be a part of what seems like a huge fad of our day, but then I figured: Fuck it. I am of our day. I don't have to see through everything. Or I can even see through things a little bit, but I'm still a part of them.
CHAPTER 5How to Be Good at Playing Charades
I have taught How to Be Good at Playing Charades in a bunch of contexts. I have taught corporate charades classes. I've taught charades as part of a regular games night I ran at a hotel, and I taught it on the radio. The most fun was teaching charades as a six-part series of classes that people signed up for. They paid me money to come to a classroom every week. We did charades drills and exercises. Sometimes I gave them homework. I gave out charades certificates at the end.
For reasons that are completely unclear to me, I was very nervous about whether I was qualified to teach charades. This is crazy! I'm perfectly okay with teaching a music class to trained musicians, even though I don't read music or really know anything about it, but for some reason I was worried that my qualifications as a charades expert might be challenged.
So I did something I never do in my classes, which was that I really tried to establish my authority on the first day. People acted out clues, and we would collectively try to guess them, and I would guess the clue before everyone else in the class every single time. I felt like some old martial arts instructor, challenging people in the class to try to push him over as a way to win their respect. I did this consciously.
* * *
When I planned my first charades class, I worked really hard on the announcement because I didn't think anyone would sign up. I figured that just sending out the announcement might constitute the whole project, but I was pleasantly surprised when quite a lot of people signed up.
A lot of people also dropped out. I think they dropped out when they realized it really was just a course in charades. I think they expected there to be something else happening.
There are basically two sets of skills for playing charades. There are acting-related skills and guessing-related skills — sort of like fielding and hitting in baseball, or offense and defense in hockey.
When you're acting out a clue for another person, it's really important to remember that the other person does not know what you're acting out. This seems obvious, but a lot of the time, people will act out a charade in a way which would make perfect sense if you knew what the title was, but from which the title would be completely impossible to guess if you didn't know it.
This seems like a trivial point, but it's important. It means that, if at all possible, you shouldn't get angry at the other person for not knowing what it is you're trying to act out. It's one of the most common failures that people have: they'll act something out, and the other person won't be able to guess it, and their response will be to do the same gesture again, but more exasperated this time. So the first step really is just an acceptance of the fact that the other person does not know.
Some of the tips that apply to charades are the same tips you would apply to any improvisation: Be precise in your gestures. Be wholehearted. Don't forget to bring emotional content to what you do. These things help a lot.
When you're guessing, assume that every detail is important. If someone is drinking a beverage, you might say drink or water. But if they're drinking a beverage in a dainty manner with their pinkie extended, assume that's part of the clue — that there is a reason for that. The word that they're trying to connote cannot be drink, because no one would try to connote the word drink by drinking in this very specific manner. The word might be tea or English.
The most important thing to remember for everyone involved is that it's a dialogue. That is, it's your job to respond to each other. So, as the guesser, throw lots of guesses at the person acting out the clue, because this allows them to change what they are doing, or lets you know if you're on the right or wrong track. If you just sit and watch, waiting until you know for sure, you'll never get it right. Similarly, as the person acting out the clue, if you just take the approach that you want to take, while ignoring what is or isn't getting through to the people you're acting for, it's going to take a very long time.
Playing charades is specifically about the difficulty of communication. Without the difficulty, there is no game. With practice you could get better at communicating through the obstacles that charades presents you, but that's not really the point. It's a game, so the point is not the elimination of obstacles — it's enjoying yourself. To learn to play charades, you have to learn to enjoy yourself while trying to communicate with people who don't understand you and don't know what you know.
CHAPTER 6Don't Pretend There Is No Leader
People are very uncomfortable with roles. They like to pretend they're not in charge when they are in charge. They like to pretend someone else who is in charge is not in charge. They don't understand that it can be great to be in charge and it can be great to have someone else in charge — that there can be pleasure in these different roles.
I think a thing that happens a lot in certain kinds of creative groups and certain kinds of activist groups is a pretense that everything is collaborative and nonhierarchical, when in truth someone is the leader. Often that person is the person who started the group.
There are several reasons people pretend they're not the leader. One reason is a simple mistake. The mistake is that they think it's mean to tell people what to do, and they want to be nice. They think that being bossy isn't nice, or having power over people isn't nice. But that's silly! Of course it's oppressive to be someone's leader if you give them no choice — if you force them to have you as a leader — but a lot of the time people want someone to be their leader, especially if they've joined your group.
So in exactly the same way that the rules of a game aren't oppressive but let you play the game and are where the fun of the game lies, leadership can be useful. It's what lets you do things. And it's not cruel.
In some cases, people who feel nervous about leading might be taking their leadership too seriously — thinking it's so powerful they have to temper it. Or they might just be scared. It's scary to be in charge, and it's nice to imagine that decisions are someone else's responsibility. Also, they may not realize that people who aren't leaders typically don't want to make all the decisions. They don't want to impose their vision. What they specifically appreciate about the leader is that the leader can provide a vision and make decisions. If you started the group, it can be hard to imagine that someone might want to be in your group and not be in charge of it, because it's so exciting for you to be in charge of it. That creates a situation where leaders are often disappointed with people in their group, because the leader gives over some power, and the people in the group don't take as much initiative as the leader imagined they would. So the leader is trying to give them something that they think the people in the group desperately and jealously want, but which they actually don't want at all.
I think this happens with bands all the time, and in social justice activism. In these realms, it can be hard because there's often an ideological opposition to the idea of leadership.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Chairs are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman, Sheila Heti. Copyright © 2011 Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Foreword,
1. People's Protective Bubbles Are Okay,
2. How to Make Friends in a New City,
3. The Uniqlo Game,
4. Going to the Gym,
5. How to Be Good at Playing Charades,
6. Don't Pretend There Is No Leader,
7. The Chairs Are Where the People Go,
8. How to Teach Charades,
9. Miscommunication Is Nice,
10. The Gibberish Game,
11. The Residents' Association,
12. There Are Some Games I Won't Play with My Friends,
13. Social Music,
14. Manners,
15. How to Improvise, and How Not to Not Improvise,
16. The Crazy Parts,
17. Charging for My Classes,
18. What Is a Game?,
19. Spam,
20. Margaux,
21. Charades Homework,
22. Harvard and Class,
23. The Rocks Game,
24. Some Video on the Internet,
25. People Who Take My Classes,
26. Shut Up and Listen,
27. Is Monogamy a Trick?,
28. The Conducting Game,
29. Sitting on the Same Side of the Table,
30. Seeing My Friends Drunk for the First Time,
31. A Decision Is a Thing You Make,
32. All the Games Are Meant to Solve Problems, but Problems Are Unpleasant,
33. Home Maladies,
34. Keeping Away People Who Would Be Disappointed,
35. The Happiness Class,
36. The Converge / Diverge Game,
37. Going to Parties,
38. Kensington Market,
39. Keeping People Quiet,
40. Feeling Like a Fraud,
41. Negotiation,
42. Fighting Games,
43. What Experimental Music Is For,
44. These Projects Don't Make Money,
45. Seeing Your Parents Once a Week,
46. Asking a Good Question,
47. A Mind Is Not a Terrible Thing to Measure,
48. Doing One Thing Doesn't Mean You're Against Something Else,
49. Get Louder or Quit,
50. Why Robert McKee Is Wrong About Casablanca,
51. Conferences Should Be an Exhilarating Experience,
52. Improvised Behavior,
53. Storytelling Is Not the Same Thing as Conversation,
54. Introducing People in the Classes,
55. Making the City More Fun for You and Your Privileged Friends Isn't a Super-,
Noble Political Goal,
56. Seeing John Zorn Play Cobra,
57. Impostor Syndrome,
58. Nimbyism,
59. Conducting from the Center of a Circle,
60. Why Noise Music?,
61. Absenteeism,
62. Failure and Games,
63. Why a Computer Only Lasts Three Years,
64. What Are These Classes For?,
65. Who Are Your Friends?,
66. Neighborhoods Change,
67. Atheism and Ritual,
68. Social Capital,
69. Sitting Down and Listening as a Role,
70. Everyone's Favorite Thing and Unfavorite Thing Are Different,
71. Finding an Ending,
72. Wearing a Suit All the Time Is a Good Way to Quit Smoking,
Acknowledgments,
About the Authors,
Copyright,