1.    First, I moved around a lot.  While far from being an orphan, my home life wasn’t particularly stable and hence I never spent long enough to mesh with a particular peer group.
2.    I had curiosities—intellectual, artistic, etc.—bred at home (the product of hyper-intelligent, albeit questionably stable parents (at the time…they’re very cool now)), but these same curiosities were stifled and squashed at school and by my schoolmates (or at least it felt that way); being curious and different seemed anathema to most of them.
3.    Third, the intangibles:  call it karma, fate, whatever.  I just seemed to be born to be maladaptive.  Girls and boys alike—far from disliking me—were indifferent to me.  They didn’t feel strong enough to include me nor to actively cast me from their circles.

For much of my life, I strove to reconcile this lack of childhood popularity—to fit in, to feel included.  For example, I remember one time hanging with some boys who made “pressure bombs”:  Drano and something else in a 2 liter soda bottle, whose chemical combination created an explosion that burst forth all over the suburban streets of where I lived at the time.  I tried to force a sense of amusement from this profoundly juvenile endeavor, but I couldn’t do it.  Everyone knew I was fraud.  They knew I didn’t enjoy blowing shit up and my pained masks of enjoyment just served to further ostracize me from their inner-circle.

While the pressure bomb is an extreme example of foolishly trying to fit in, I’ve subsequently had many other opportunities to feign enjoyment.  I engaged in activities I knew were at odds with my authentic self:  the truth seeker, the conversationalist, the artist, the man who gives a shit about the fate of the planet and its inhabitants.

I’ve strained to tap my foot at house parties where House of Pain blared (an apt anthemic band if there ever was one)—drinking grog from red Solo cups hoping it’ll make it bearable.  I’ve endured the booze-saturated bouquet of countless bars and clubs where the music is so loud and the crowd so numbed from alcohol that the prospect of a real conversation is virtually nonexistent.  I’ve even been in some pretty lofty places where the conversation often devolves into talking about “stuff”—vacations, 80’s/90’s TV trivia, cell-phones, celebrity gossip, etc.  I’ve done this all in the name of fitting in, pathetically attempting to heal that 14 year-old who couldn’t get excited by making things go boom.

While I’ve gotten pretty good at both leaving situations that don’t serve me, as well as railroading conversations in directions I find meaningful, I have still felt a void.  I feel like the vast majority of social infrastructures are designed for escapism.  Bars, clubs, lounges and many private parties (that curiously try to replicate the experience of those former institutions) don’t lend themselves to social engagement.  They create barriers.  They try to sell you booze and the idea that anaesthetization and cosmetic posturing equal having a good time.  I don’t mean to rag on these institutions—God bless people who enjoy them—but ultimately, they are not for me.

When I organized my first Lucid event about a year ago it was based on the premise of creating a context for engagement.  Just as alcohol and loud music create the context for a bar (things that work against engaging with the world and your fellow human), at Lucid people talk about amazing projects and ideas (things that promote engagement).  I’ve also tried to keep volumes at conversational levels (if you like music that much, go to a concert), and I’ve limited the booze to wine and beer.  It doesn’t make one right and the other wrong—it’s just a choice of how you want to spend your time.

I’m still working on refining the events—they’re not perfect and I need your help.  But the intention is there:  I want a place where it’s not only tolerable to be curious and smart and shining and sensitive and different and weird and expressive and eclectic and whatever—I want a place where these things are exalted.  Whether you felt excluded or included in the past; whether you excluded or included in the past—you’re welcome to come to Lucid in the future.  Just be and bring yourself, whoever that might be that particular day.

If this sounds interesting, I hope you attend the events and make them your own.

Yours,

David Friedlander

So the good folks over at All Day Buffet determined that Lucid was worthy of their NEWYork100.  I thought it was like a NYC based Fortune 500 for people and ideas that don’t make money.  But I was wrong.  Here’s what they say about the list:

NEWYork100 highlights 100 of the most innovative, rule- breaking, model-changing ideas to come out of the Big Apple. Call it social innovation, intelligent capitalism, idealistic enterprise: We’re curating and highlighting the most creative, resourceful, and innovative people, companies and movements in New York. All rebuilding the city better and brighter and recreating the way we understand the world. These 100 are just the beginning. After all, it is a big apple, so get ready to get full on good.

Thanks guys for the props.

Here are our presenters:

Daniel Pinchbeck, author of bestselling book “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”,  will explain how a new consciousness can emerge out of the collapse of the self-evidently pathological economic and social systems of the status quo (see some of his writing at Reality Sandwich, a blog he helped co-found).  Check out this trailer for his forthcoming movie on the same topic.

[vimeo 3254225]

Dickson Despommier, Columbia Professor and founder of Vertical Farms, will presenting his vision of how to address growing urban populations with the need for feeding those populations in a sustainable manner.  Check out Dickson on the Colbert Report.

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2912251&w=425&h=350&fv=videoId%3D173624]

And last but not least, Amanda Parkes of MIT’s Tangible Media Group, talking about non-anthropomorphized motion in robotics in the context of product design. In other words, she’ll be explaining how robotic motion will be as elemental in future products as their color and form.

The event will be held at SALT Art Space at 1160 Broaday (SE corner of 27th), doors open at 6:45 or so, presenter begin at 8:00 (please arrive before 8 to be seated and so forth).  $10 bucks at the door.  What else?  Wine and tap water served.  Light snacks.  BYO’s welcome.  See you there.

Click here for more info on Daniel Pinchbeck.

Lastly, here’s some non-sequitur entertainment courtesy of David Bowie.  Read my note while listening to the song (assiduously ignoring the lame montage)…it’s trippy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBwy5y_tdQk]

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2759217&w=425&h=350&fv=autoPlay%3Dfalse]

One day, FRED’s organization contacted my friend.  FRED said my friend couldn’t use their logo without express permission, even if, as was the case here, it was used to directly promote the FRED conference.  My friend had to dissolve the FRED Meet-Up.
FRED later came back with a compromise we’ll call FREDy.  FREDy is an arm of the FRED conference, but it would be purely for enthusiasts.  Under the conditions of FREDy licensing, one can build FRED-style events, but they are not FRED events officially or legally.  It’s a win-win for FRED:  if the events are successful and high quality, they add luster to the FRED brand; if they are unsuccessful and poor quality, FRED can distance themselves from any ill repute.  Lastly, though a FREDy conference takes considerable time and effort, FREDy hosts are strictly forbidden from making money off the events.
My friend now has no community and a bad aftertaste from FRED’s branding policing.

We must not judge FRED too harshly.  Even though FRED embodies ideals many of us would like to incorporate into a community, it is ultimately a business, and businesses must protect the integrity of their brand.  It’s as if the local deli wanted to start calling itself 7-Eleven to attract business.  FRED never claimed to be in the community formation business—they are in the conference business, and they are doing well in that business as far as I know.  If they weren’t doing so well, they might not be able to deliver the top-notch free content my friend and I enjoy.
I started Lucid NYC inspired by FRED, but I wanted something more regular and accessible, such that a community could emerge.  I was hoping, in time, that Lucid would pay for itself.  But the commercial aspect—or perhaps my inability to navigate the commercial aspect—has been a thorn in my side.  There always seems a tradeoff between maintaining the mission and money (venue, drinks, time spent organizing, etc.).
The reason Lucid has been offline is because I’m trying figure out how to stay true to the mission while being economically sustainable (the current iteration is most distinctly not).
I’ll be coming back with something soon—whether it’s Lucid NYC or called something else.  Regardless, if you have any ideas if you have thoughts or ideas about the intersection of commerce and community—can it be done, should it be done, how it could/should be done—I’d love to hear from you.  I think we are in desperate need of enlightened ideals and community to support their realization.  How to create a community—one not pigeonholed by specific and limited ideologies, one not corrupted or beholden to outside enterprises, one that will last—I think, remains to be seen.
Until next time…
David

I recently heard one of the most horrifying sounds of my life: Neil Young’s power ballad about an electric car called “Fuel Line.”  Young sings, “Her engine’s running and the fuel is clean/She only uses it ’cause she’s a machine/She don’t use much though, just to get around.”  Cowgirl in the Sand, it is not.

To be fair, Young’s song should be given context.  The album—which I’ve only read about thankfully—is imbued with a heavy dose of self-mockery.  At the same time, it seems emblematic of an artlessness that often characterizes crusaders of sustainability.  Everything is emblazoned with the words “green”, “eco” and “sustainability” because we have reduced our lives and their impact on the world to numerical values—creating a company or project that isn’t explicit in its intent is a waste of carbon.  Everything we do must be done deliberately, carefully, artlessly.

Yesterday, I listened to an interview with the author Andre Codrescu, who was pushing his book “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin play chess.”  Codrescu used a supposed chess game between Tristan Tzara and Lenin (the respective fathers of Dadaism and Soviet Communism) as a challenge between ideology and art; between that which is easily defined and that which resists definition.

Codrescu then went on to say how we must view this current era—the “post-human era,” an era defined by our ever-increasing dependency on technology—through a Dadaist lens.  How we must resist the definitions imposed upon by an easy-to-define movement like the “information age.”  For when we become defined, we become systematized—inserted in and consumed by an ideology.  I witnessed this at a technology conference I attended last week:  a largely sexless, artless carnival of technological zealotry.

Advocates of sustainability are not much different from the post-human technologists.  Both are searching for “solutions” and “applications” to solve “problems”:  How do we solve the problem of better connectivity, of reduced carbon consumption?  It’s all very mathematical, clinical and systematic.  When you artificially superimpose this mathematical mentality upon art, you create monstrosities like Young’s “Fuel Line.”

But do we need more systems?  Might we, as past Lucid presenter and friend Filip Noterdaeme suggests, need more “mischief”?  Less order, more humanity?

I know we can’t play dumb to the woes of the world.  I know what we’re up against, and I believe these things must be addressed efficiently and directly.  I just don’t think it should come at the expense of our humanity. We are so busy creating new systems.  There is little time to be artful with our lives whilst improving, maintaining and refining these systems.

Moreover, the systems—in a quantitative sense—require more energy, greater carbon footprints.  We build gadgets and webpages and biodegradable pantyhose and it’s great, but it usually means more factories, bigger servers, more shit into the universe.  On the other hand, our humanity, the artfulness by which we live, the conversations we develop, the passions we share—they are carbon neutral or often regenerative, and cost-free.  To trade in the commodity of conversation (the only art form I can lay claim to) was why I created Lucid NYC.

If history is any predictor of the future, there is heartening evidence of art’s victory.  Codrescu contends that the fall of the Soviet Union signified humanity’s resistance to being subsumed by systems.  Hopefully, out of our current orgy of crises, where people are flailing to solve myriad problems with myriad systems, a newfound sense of humanity and artfulness will emerge, where we are not consumed with solutions because we begin to question the nature and existence of the problems.

A few weeks ago I rewatched Network, a perpetually-timely film that centers around an inveterate newscaster named Howard Beale, who looses his shit when told he’s being taken off the air.  He launches into an on-air oratory that details how Americans have come to be defined by their desperate, numb, automotonic lives; their only comfort coming from the narcosis of TV fantasy.  His rant culminates in the catchphrase, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Last night, I had three gentlemen, while not mad in the Bealean sense of the word, who are committed to not taking it anymore:

• Mitch Joachim, who’s posing essential questions and solutions about how to reimagine the urban planning/architectural shit-storm we’re living in today; a storm that is directly and profoundly contributing to the continued slaughter of our environment.

• Filip Noterdaeme, who’s Homeless Museum of Art begs (forgive the pun) museum powers-that-be–and those of us complicit to those powers–to question how their motivation to expand the edifice of the museum obfuscates the museum’s mission and alienates the artist and museum-goer alike.  Through producing HOMU, Noterdaeme both serves as an important countervailing voice to the corporatization of the arts, while being a generator of vital artistic expression in and of itself.

• Finally, Jeremy Kirk, who calls us to question our complicity with Empire–with the forces that kill, destroy and subjugate.  Last night, he asked us to look at the lens through which we see the world–how our privilege as Americans (and most of us are privileged regardless of whether we are American born), is often directly proportionate to others’ suffering.  He challenged us to begin divesting ourselves of our privilege (and don’t worry, you can start small), confident that the liberation from no longer being complicit with violence toward others is greater than the sundry and temporary liberations that privilege affords.

I don’t know if Lucid NYC is subversive per se, but it’s my humble way to create an alternative to the prevailing modalities of social interactions; providing a safe (and audible) environment for people to create conversations that scrutinize and evaluate our assumptions about the way things are and the way things could be; a place, to quote Beale, where people can say, “I’m a human being God dammit.  My life [and voice] has value.”

Thank you for all those who made it out to Brooklyn last night.  A special thanks to Mitch, Al and everyone else at Metropolitan Exchange for hosting.  Until next time, keep questioning, keep human.

David