Gad, How Embarassking...

Every Wednesday morning is "Goodie Day" at my office - one of the side benefits of working in a branch that consists of 26 women and 4 men. We take it in turns to do this, and whoever gets the goodies is usually expected to speak on something (not necessarily work-related).

Today it was my turn - I had forgotten, so I had to nip out to the Rheinland Bakery on Fort St. where I usually get my baked nummies.

So that was that taken care of, now what was I going to talk about? A month or so ago someone had set up a "poetry day" where you drew the name of a co-worker out of a hat and had to write some kind of ditty about her. I declined to participate because I felt I could not refrain from insulting someone inadvertently. But today I thought I would read some of my poetry, written years ago when I was an ESL teacher in Japan. It was 1991, Dr. Seuss had just died so I composed some doggerel in imitation of his style - though in retrospect it seems more like Percy Dovetonsils.

Here is what I read, An ABC of Japanese Substance Abuse. And obviously, once again I totally misjudged my audience. Some people got it right away while others stood there as if I'd banged a railroad spike between their eyes. Didn't even get much of a laugh when someone asked me if I used that to teach English and I told them the Cigarette Joke.

A great flop and this time I really embarrassed myself. I guess what sets me doing something like this now from me doing this 20 years ago is that I won't dwell on it and I think, fuck, if they don't understand it, it's their fucking loss, right?

I mean, what the fucking fuck, eh?
Ya buncha stiffs....

David Byrne on PowerPoint

Went to open a new bank account today. At the bank. You think they'd be used to this sort of request by now. But no.

Meanwhile, David Byrne is interviewed in The Onion this week, talking about what he's been up to. One of his activities is visual art pieces composed using PowerPoint:

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O: How did you start working with PowerPoint in an artistic context?

DB: I wanted to do some readings from the New Sins book, and since it's a kind of proselytizing book, I thought I should do it like a sales talk or a motivational meeting. I realized from looking at airline magazines that all of the salespeople and marketers were hunched over these little projectors: They've got their laptops and this program that has their text and their slides and everything that goes into a projector. I thought, "That's what I should use, so then the whole book would have the look of one of those presentations, with slides and text and bullet points and stuff to point to."

One of the good things about the program is that it's super-easy to learn. I learned to put something together in a rudimentary way in about an hour. And it's sort of intuitive, so you can poke around and find out other things it can do. There's a button that makes the show run by itself, so you can turn these into films: slide shows and arrows and animations that never stop, that can be fast or at a more stately pace or whatever. In a kind of primitive, limited way—it is full of glitches, so you can really do some fun stuff with it.

O: Have you done any presentations under unlikely circumstances—say, in an actual corporate environment?

DB: The closest I got to that was when Wired magazine arranged that I got video monitors in the lobby of the Condé Nast building. There was a little label that told you what it was, basically, but other than that, it was just these big monitors with stuff going on. It's basically a corporate building—half of it's Condé Nast, and the other half is some huge legal firm. And one guy, probably from the IT department for one of the magazines, came up to me while I was tweaking the monitors and said, "I don't get it. Why did you use PowerPoint? It would have been so much easier to do it in Flash or some other program. Why would you use something that is full of problems and really limited in what it does?" And the cage I realized I'd walked into was that the people viewing it weren't seeing it in an art-gallery context.

I realized later, as everyone does, that what I should have said was that, of course, I like the limitations and the faults and the clunkiness of the program. I love the fact that it eliminates choices of what you can do, because there's so much you can't do. And having stuff that can do everything is not always a good idea. Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively. So I like the fact that you can only do certain things, and some of the things it can do, it can't do that well, but it does them in its own kind of way. If you accept that, it's okay. Sometimes I can tell it to do things, and it really has a freak-out. It starts shaking, and it's great! I mean, try and do that in Flash. I showed him stuff that it was doing where the dissolves would be so imperfect that it would do this very complicated destruction of the image before the next one cleared. To do that in another program would be really, really time-consuming—to make something look this bad, but in a particular way.
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The Man burns in 142 days.