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A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

The Tower of Babel

Cities live and breathe. As I wrote in a post last week on Social Media, cities are no more artificial [technological] than the hives of bees. As we go about our daily lives [mostly unconsciously,] we psycho-drift from block to block through neighborhoods that we know well, in amongst communities that have been drawn together by like-minded people. Think East Village in Manhattan, Venice Beach in Los Angeles, Camden Town in London, Pigalle in Paris – and here in Portland, the Pearl District.

Where we tend to live and work is often amongst communities of like-minded people, unless, as in the USA, one lives in a far-flung exurb and commutes for hours to work. Over centuries we have moved as a species from the rural countryside into large urban centres. As we have done so the ‘idea’ of the city sprang up. Throughout different periods in history, planners and architects have had differing ideas about how to cultivate urban living arrangements. There has been some success and much failure.

As James Kunstler writes in his book, The City in Mind, – “[the] nation’s massive suburban build-out was an orgy of misspent energy and material resources that squandered our national wealth and left us with an infrastructure of daily life that, left as is, has poor prospects in the new century.” Kunstler points out that as global warming, oil depletion and other epochal disorders are upon us, we must reconsider what is a ‘city.’

He argues that one of the chief side effects of the move to suburbanism is “the cultural destruction…especially the loss of knowledge, tradition, skill, custom and vernacular wisdom in the art of city-making that was thrown in the dumpster of history….”

A city is not just a series of streets and avenues with buildings on either side, a city is people, culture, society and the networks that form to bind those societies together into communities. The suburbs were literally a dream, an idea that General Motors had of a drive-in utopia in its plan for a World of Tomorrow. Kunstler goes on to point out the folly of the “Edge City,” a term coined by the writer Joel Garreau. Kunstler says “I essay to show how Atlanta took the urban model of car-crazy Los Angeles to its most ludicrous, and in my view, terminal stage. With Atlanta, you can forego agonizing over the future, because the present doesn’t even work there.” As he points out “our human ecologies – namely our towns and cities – remain devalued, depopulated and decivilized.”

In America we prefer landscape over urbanism. What then now as our dependence upon oil, refined as gasoline for cars that transport one person at a time from these suburbs to the cities, proves the folly of these far-flung suburbs? Will we see a move toward urban vitality? A migration back to the city?

Government spending at any level, state or local, does little to help. We need to “nurture the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing” – writes Douglas Rae, the Richard Ely Professor of Management and Professor of Political Science at Yale University, in his book, City; Urbanism and Its End. “Small scale retailing, neighborhood clubs, informal enforcement of sidewalk civility and new urbanist design may be the keys to the future.”

I agree with Rae on the idea of “nurturing unplanned civic engagements” as he puts it but that’s as far as I would go. The rest of his thought sounds like the issue of we humans being in control of our destinies again, trying to have the answer that is beyond nature, beyond what we actually do when we congregate in cities. Our desire for urban centres always seem to be about ‘order’ or ‘cleanliness’ and ‘organization.’ So on one hand we have the thinkers – the planners and the architects, and on the other – the citizens who actually inhabit the space that we call city. What we might call the ‘Few and the Many.’

Alongside a piece by the New York Times film critic, A.O.Scott, called Metropolis Now, where he writes about the idea of how yesterday’s film sets became today’s cities, there is a sidebar that takes some lines from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” – “The minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. So they hired hands for wages. But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it. One man’s hymns of praise became other men’s curses.” There’s that word again, dream.

We humans dream. We dream of controlling nature, we dream of saving the earth, we dream of organizing our cities. Those dreaming deny the fact that cities live and breathe. Not the concrete architecture, not the buildings – the people that inhabit them. When someone talks of Rome having a ’soul, a feeling’ they are misinterpreting the difference between the city and its cultural makeup; people can be said to have souls and feelings, we ‘know’ this – buildings don’t have soul and feelings.

As Fernando Pessoa writes – “Only if you don’t know what flowers, stones and rivers are can you talk about their feelings. To talk about the soul of flowers, stones and rivers, is to talk about yourself, about your delusions. Thank God stones are just stones, and rivers just rivers, and flowers just flowers.” We dream and we delude ourselves.

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class dreams of organizing urban centres [which he correctly identifies as 'place'] around the idea of a mythical “creative class” who are bound by the idea of the “three T’s,” Technology, Talent and Tolerance. This dream involves cities having a strong technology base, a “creative” class as he calls it, and a strong gay community. And of course the idea he spins is that to grow a city’s economic base it should invest in nurturing the “three T’s.” Once again – The Few and the Many. Planners and architects can no more decide what a city’s culture will be than we know that a stone has feeling.

The fabric of a city is its population. Like a bee hive [architecture] or an ant colony [social network], natural rules of engagement spring up through the daily interaction of those who inhabit a city. They commune. They gather in tribes in their ‘places.’ They share information, ideas, things they like. They become less ’selfish.’ They are city.

As John Gray writes in Straw Dogs – “Anyone who wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to the desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”

Most large cities have a zoo.

Listen to and download Psycho Drift. Shriekback – Psycho Drift

For references – (more…)

Will Ferrell and Heidi Klum solve the left brain vs right brain dilemma.

“My main task in writing the drawing book was to dig down underneath everything I knew about art and drawing to try to find the most fundamental level of ‘thinking’ that goes on in drawing,” she said. “What was I seeing, how was I ‘seeing’ what I was seeing, and how was I transforming those perceptions into a drawing? It makes my brain hurt even now to remember the effort required by that seemingly simple task.” – Betty Edwards in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. 

I have written many songs in my lifetime. Frantic bass lines over frenetic beats mostly, and then, in conjunction with other like-minded musicians together we formed the complete whole entity recognizable as the “song.” My all time favorite song I’ve written with others? ‘Natural’s Not In It’ with Gang of Four, found first on its ground breaking [so I'm told] debut album, Entertainment! and later as the title track to Sofia Coppola’s movie Marie Antoinette. A close second? Evaporation by another of my bands, Shriekback, from its album ‘Care’ which also made the movie soundtrack ranks being as it was in Michael Mann’s ‘prequel’ to Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter.

The act of songwriting or the forming of musical ideas is a nonverbal form of intellect; we musicians cannot ignore the artist within, the one that resides in the right hemisphere of our brains, but being a nonverbal activity it obviously can be hard to describe the process that takes place from the germ of an idea to the seeding and ultimate fruition of a song – the left, logical hemisphere of the brain is of no help here. Unfortunately for some time the idea that the partitioning of our more creative thinking, tapping a mental connection via countless synapses that form the route to the right side of our brains, was dismissed and often scorned. Of course now we know the theory has been well tested and confirmed; simply put the left side of our brain is where our language center resides; it is the logical, linear problem solving and processing half of our brain. The right side, the side I use the most I reckon, is home to spatial perception and nonverbal concepts; it is the nonlinear, high-concept source of the imagination and of pleasure. It’s my ‘ideas centre’ where the songs, the ideas and even this post come from. I write less songs these days but I write much more; two thirds of my day at Nemo Design is spent over-heating the right hemisphere of my brain.

Which brings me to creative businesses; where are they headed and who will lead them? You might be surprised to learn that the current common wisdom points to a new generation of business leaders who “get the right brain thing.” In an article in the NY Times titled Let Computers Compute. It’s The Age of The Right Brain there’s this nugget – When General Motors hired Robert A. Lutz in 2001 to whip its product development into shape, he told The New York Times about his new approach. “It’s more right brain. It’s more creative,” he said. “I see us as being in the art business,” he said, “art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.” [That sounds positively McLuhan - see post below.] The article goes on to point out that today someone with a master of fine arts, M.F.A., trumps someone who holds a good old M.B.A. The point made that rings loud and clear is that if G.M. says it is in the art business, every company in any other industry is, too.

My most successful songwriting was mostly in collaboration with others – the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. It was about investing in each others ideas and sharing and adding to the burgeoning art piece or project with complete openness – today we call that radical transparency; nothing hidden, nothing guarded, no walls, no barriers to entry.

So, after considering the worth of being a right-brained musician, a songwriter, a blogger, a creative who finds himself running Nemo Design’s outward-facing digital properties I’ve come to this conclusion – I’m in the right place because Nemo has been set up with tools that provide a success formula for the future [left brain,] and that the right brain is King in our business [right brain!]

At Nemo Design we need to harness the power of the collective whole, understand that at the core of the company we are fundamentally operating as a ‘right-brained unit.’ When we require logic and strategy our left brains won’t let us down but the thinking and all the fun, the pleasure centre, the high concepts and the imagination all reside to the right. We no longer need to verbalize our ideas; we can now show them interactively in motion, in film, in video, in graphics, in projections on buildings, in sculptures, in events, in our actions because actions speak louder than…. 

So what does the future look like for branding, marketing and design companies like Nemo Design and similar companies such as Anomoly, Odopod and Crispin, Porter + Bogusky?

Who innovates, who creates in collaboration with others, who shares in the wealth of knowledge and experience that employees hold in their heads? Does it have to be put in words or business plans – left brain. Or expressed creatively through drawings, film, music, design and song – right brain? If Nemo Design embraces ideas and innovation (right brain) over execution and strategy (left brain) what will it look like in 5 years?