A600AASS 23 - 11.12.22

The Four Seasons, Amsterdam in December, Presentations and Podcasts, and Bedtime Books

From the abstract to the concrete

How do I describe the way the light -- muted white, green, red, yellow and blue -- played across the set? Like a Dan Flavin piece, one gifted its colour to the other, marking the shift of time, shaping something new.

Then what about that triangle? Or the square, circle and line that were the sources of the light? What about capturing the majesty of their pure geometries, seemingly sent from heaven? And then what about the way they slow danced through air above the stage, making and remaking space in quarter time?

And then the music: Max Richter's reimagining of Vivaldi. Four Seasons of whomp, wooze and wonder, all loved-up and supercharged on speed, straining at the edges of the orchestra pit and threatening to swallow us whole and then...

release.

The dancers soared. Held aloft on the amphetamine rush, their softhard bodies picked out by hardsoft light.

They flitted, rained and rumbled across the stage like spring's flight and summer's storms. In waves they heralded the changing of the seasons. In pairs, they wove stories of awakening, abundance, abandon and, finally, snow-white sleep.

And then there's me in the audience, gasping. Salty-cheeked and awed. Fiending for more.

A heart and soul, stolen by dance.

(You can watch a trailer for David Dawson's transcendent The Four Seasons here.)

It's my favourite time of year in this part of the world. The intensity of the summer and its obligation to make the most of things has faded from view. The leaden slump from January to February is still at a safe distance.

In a week or so, I'll have been in Amsterdam two years. The fog that enchanted me in late 2020 has been rolling in again, filtering high frequencies from eyes and ears. Foggy days are quiet days, an inducement to gentleness. We've been lighting the fire and drinking bourbon-spiked hot chocolate.

We went to the ballet on Wednesday and a storytelling night on Friday. A storyteller called Xina offered a few more stitches for my soul. She spoke about finding her identity in her 50s. Today, we're heading to the Rijks Museum, and will probably head to Bocca for their excellent coffee afterwards.

For someone who makes a living out of trying to understand and interpret culture, these sorts of excursions are surprisingly rare, so much so that I sometimes feel guilty for not doing more of them. I'm more likely to be found staring at storefronts and streetscapes, ogling advertising and overhearing conversations in cafes. The fewer the filters, the realer the talk, the greater the richness, I guess.

I spent most of my week working on a presentation for a board of directors. Helping colleagues distill three months of mind-bending work in to three slides was a sharp reminder of the abstractions on which so much of the world runs.

It was also a refresher - after 12 months away from it - on how Powerpoint encourages people to select the frame before they know what to put in it. Or to put it another way: it's like choosing the paper, the binding and the printer before you've written the damn book.

Ask people to first write the story they want to tell and watch them freeze with fear. When tasked with illustrating a coherent narrative, the singular points of data that make for a good-looking slide are often less convincing than people would like to believe.

I've recently been playing with iA's new Presenter software and it operates in a merciful inverse to Powerpoint.

First, write your narrative in Markdown. Then mark out sections for slides with a '/' and highlight titles with a '#' and subtitles with a '##'. Finally, drag-and-drop images for Presenter to format to fit.

Story and structure first. Slides second. Just the way it should be, and so damn easy -- to say nothing of delightful -- to use.

Joe and I have published another episode of Looking Out - The Podcast. We talk about how Hyundai's nailing design and Apple's forgetting it, the death of the small car in Europe, the death of Twitter (it's not dead yet) and status games.

After some feedback on the earlier episodes, we decided to script this one less and converse more, because it's in the conversation that people seem to find the value.

But stripping back the script is like stripping back the scaffolding. Without polished presentation and pre-prepared narrative taking up the majority of the show, I have to lean much more heavily on the knowledge I have to hand, and the chemistry between Joe and me.

Just before we started recording, Joe asked how I was feeling. "Fucking terrified" I responded, and for the first half of the show, you can tell. But by the end, we were in flow, much as we are when messaging, or face to face over a drink or dinner. And that's the essence I'd always hoped we'd capture.

Bedtime reading these days is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. In it, she blends the science of her work as a biologist, a reverence for nature's knowledge born of her Potawatomi heritage and a deep awareness of the interplay of mainstream and marginalised cultures. In the process, she reveals natural systems so startling in their sophistication and beauty that they can only command respect and wonder. I'll never again look at an algae-filled pond the same way.

Whew. That's enough for now, especially as this missive'll be unbidden for y'all. But if you got this far and you liked it, maybe share it with someone. And if you didn't, well a) why'd you read this far!? and b) you can always unsubscribe.

Am thinking of making these monthly. Would you mind? It's for sure been a nice break from thinking about how ChatGPT might just render a few of us professionally obsolete.

Until next time,

Drew