THE YEAR IN IDEAS: A TO Z.; Final Scratch
By MARGIE BORSCHKE
Published: December 9, 2001
Electronic music has always been a paradox of sorts. Though the D.J.'s who produce it love digital technology, they continue to rely for their source material on what many consider an archaic item: the analog vinyl record. Digital files have obvious advantages -- they don't scratch or skip, they're virtually weightless and they're easy to distribute and share -- and over the past decade, many machines have appeared on the market that allow D.J.'s to manipulate sound digitally. But digital interfaces ignore the physical facts of D.J.'ing -- the comfortable feel of a record moving back and forth under a D.J.'s hand, the responsiveness of vinyl and the spatial and visual clues D.J.'s use to remember and find tracks and beats.
FinalScratch is an attempt to solve the D.J.'s quandary. The mixing system, developed this year by a group of hackers in the Netherlands, is the first invention that allows D.J.'s to use their preferred analog materials -- two turntables, a mixer and a vinyl record -- to manipulate digital music files.
A 12-inch vinyl disc, known as the FinalScratch record, is encoded with digital signals instead of a song; when it is played on a normal turntable, it functions something like a computer modem, sending information, instead of music, through the stylus. FinalScratch then uses that information to manipulate a digitally stored piece of music. When the D.J. manually speeds up or slows down the turntable, or ''scratches'' the vinyl, the digital music file is instantly altered in exactly the same way a real record would be. It is a marriage of high and low technology -- 21st-century digital music, tweaked and massaged by the D.J.'s old-fashioned hand. Margie Borschke
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Goth Talk: Margie Borschke talks to Robert Smith, Nylon, February 2000
Published in Nylon, February 2000
(This may be a different edit than the published article.)
Goth Talk
by Margie Borschke
Robert Smith looks unhappy. He is posing for a photo outside his house in England, wearing a baggy tracksuit top, dark trousers, a mop of limp black hair and no makeup. His smile is forced. Next to him stands some blonde kid from Germany, beaming like a maniac. The picture is posted on the website, the Holy Hour, under the heading My Cure Holidays. It was snapped early last fall shortly after Smith finished recording Bloodflowers, the latest (and rumored to be last) album from The Cure.
When I meet up with Smith at the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Manhattan he looks somewhat less beleaguered. Just slightly. As lead singer, chief songwriter and the Cure’s key fixture (12 different musicians have been a part of the band’s 23 year history; Smith and guitarist Simon Gallup are the only constants), he is the band’s obvious though reluctant spokesman. He hates fans that show up on his doorstep and finds interviews and photo shoots almost as tedious. Smith, despite having never worked any other job, save a week with the post office (sacked) and a month as a gardener, is still uncomfortable with pop stardom. He blushes when asked for an autograph and is genuinely upset by fans who camp out on the beach near his house, smoking dope and playing Cure songs.
Robert Smith is forty now, married for 11 years to his long-time girlfriend Mary Poole, and most definitely grown-up. He lives in a quiet seaside town near Brighton and speaks more often of afternoons with his young nephews and nieces than of wild nights on the town. He has a tidy fortune tucked away. He seems happy. Even content. Actually, he’s very much the sensible Englishman. Yes, his hair is lightly teased, his lipstick is smeared, he’s wearing eyeliner and enormous club-kid black boots, but we should all be so outrageously mature at mid-life. And yes, he can still find beauty—and a moody pop song—in melancholia
Elektra, the Cure’s US record company, has rented a suite at the Chelsea Hotel to give the interviews some “atmosphere”. There are more models around than junkies these days, but the Chelsea remains as eccentric and downwardly fashionable as ever. Smith, who spends enough time in hotels to value comfortable beds over hip quotients, isn’t staying here. Actually, he doesn’t seem the least bit enchanted with the place. “It’s all very Elvis Costello, isn’t it,” he deadpans, poking about the sunny suite, whose cracked plaster walls are painted a jarring lime green. He sinks into an armchair covered in mauve velvet. “Fun-kay.” He says, sarcastically. It seems Robert Smith, onetime innovator of freakish streetwear trends, is suspicious of down-market glamour.
The Cure are not just a success, they’re a phenomenon. In over two decades they have recorded 23 albums and sold millions, all with next to no help from commercial radio. They’re among the most bootlegged bands of all time, up there in Grateful Dead territory, a distinction that speaks volumes about their fans’ devotion. Yet they have never succumbed to commercial pressures—they don’t chase trends and they will not allow their music to be used in advertisements. “We’re so morally right,” Smith laughs. “I am protective about the music. I never let anyone get in the way of it or tell me what we should be doing.” Hence the band does not employ a producer or a business manager. Smith is content to do the dirty work himself. He even has a hand in their website. Smith doesn’t come off as a control freak so much as someone who stayed true to his DIY roots. (Long before Jarvis bared his bottom at the BRITS, Smith declared the ceremony a farce after being named band of the year in 1990.) Success has made him neither arrogant nor jaded. What other Platinum selling band would place a Melody Maker ad when they needed a new drummer? “Famous band needs drummer,” read Jason Cooper, the band’s current drummer, in 1994. “No metalheads. ” The man is so damn grounded.
The Cure started out as a high school band in Crawley, a sleepy suburb 30 Miles outside London. His childhood friend Laurence “Lol” Tolhurst played drums and Simon Gallup, the town’s only other punk, guitar. Smith sang and played keyboards. It was 1976. They were The Easy Cure. Their first gig was at a school-sponsored jazz/fusion festival. They played nothing of the sort. “We played a Bowie song, a Thin Lizzy song, and a Hendrix song,” Smith remembers, smiling. “The rest of it was our sort of punk stuff which was really quite bad, although we did do Killing an Arab.”
“We actually had a singer for that concert,” He continues. “His older brother had a van [and we needed transport] so he got to sing the covers. It was peculiar. He was so scared about the audience that he actually did his bit of the show wearing a crash helmet. He thought they would throw bottles.” Mostly they smashed chairs and scratched cars out in the parking lot. “It was the dawning of punk in the suburbs.” Smith shrugs. His non-jazz/fusion playing ass was temporarily suspended.
England in the late seventies and early eighties was most definitely not swinging. There was no work. London was mired in riots. Thatcher came to power. But from the hopelessness, emerged an underground youth scene that found inspiration in everything falling apart around them. There was nothing else to do, they thought, so why not make some art. Smith looks back on these days fondly. “The climate was pretty bad but the advantage was that when I left school there was no work and I was able to go on the dole for over a year. You had to attend one job interview a month and everyone used to go barefoot so they’d get another month. I bought a second hand fur coat to wear to interviews. Just one look—Bare feet and a fur coat and people think DRUGS!.” He laughs. “[I sat] home and wrote songs.” The support bought the band the time they needed to get a demo tape together. Now a foursome with Michael Dempsey on bass, they played the clubs and developed a following. By 1979 they’d released their first record, Three Imaginary Boys (1980’s Boy’s Don’t Cry in America.)
Their first single, Killing an Arab, a bit of punk-pop based on Camus’ novel the Stranger, charted and Boys Don’t Cry, a new wave-ish pop song, was a minor hit that same year. But it was the single A Forest (1980) a minimalist atmospheric song that hearlded the darker mood that came to be associated with the band. This gloomy sound, dubbed post-punk, struck a chord with the youth in the UK. After all, they were all on the dole.
The Cure remained underground—famous to a few. They lived hand to mouth—they couldn’t even move to London until 1982. When they missed the last train, they slept on the studio floor. If the record company gave them cash for a hotel they spent it in the pub. They played in clubs, drank heavily, dressed like inspired freaks, and did things on their own terms. “We didn’t really sell that many records then.” Smith remembers. “When we were doing Faith (1981) and Pornography (1982) no one ever came to see us. We only kept going because we didn’t really need anything [except] the opportunity to make another record. We always sold just enough in order to pay for the next record.”
The US didn’t pay much attention. The cheerier singles Let’s Go to Bed and the Lovecats made some waves in 1982 but it wasn’t until 1985’s Head on the Door, a melodic pop album, that the band’s popularity gelled. Both their accessible lighthearted follow-up, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987) and 1989’s Disintegration, described by one critic as “a monumentally depressing album that mentioned death in almost every song”, garnered more commercial and critical attention stateside. After Disintegration, however, Smith was worn out. He had just turned thirty, spent much of the Disintegration tour smashed and had to fire Tolhurst for being drunk since 1982. He told reporters it was over. 5 albums followed. Each one purportedly the last. By 1997, there was enough material for Galore, a second collection of singles, starting where the first retrospective Standing on a Beach (Staring at the Sea on CD 1986) left off.
The Cure has a far more varied sound than the band is given credit. Just think, they are simultaneously known for their minimalist pop (the Lovecats, Close To Me), their brooding atmospherics (almost all of the Pornography and Faith) and, of course, their layered rolling guitars (In Between Days). The Cure, themselves, have never been that gloomy—making something beautiful out of hopelessness and despair is itself an optimistic act. And there are far more upbeat and whimsical songs, both in spirit and lyrically, than their dour reputation would have you imagine. (After all, Smith is a man who sang “The Sun is up/I’m so happy I could scream.”) The tie that binds it all together is Smith’s vocals. His voice is a paradox—at once piercing and deep and passionate to the point of effortlessness, there’s always a moment where it sounds as if he might lose control. That’s the joy of it.
Bloodflowers, out this month, is a serious record. One of the songs is based on an Iain Banks novel; many others are preoccupied with loss. Smith is the first to admit there is not a single radio-friendly tune on the album. Apart from the melodrama of the title track (“These flowers will always die!” he screams, surely to the delight of some sullen chick wearing too much kohl) the album is populated by assured contemplative songs, all written in a noticeably mature voice. “Over the last three albums I’ve written songs that expressed more questions that come with experience,” Smith says of the record’s tone. “ There is a kind of world weariness that it probably rings truer [now] because I am older and more experienced.“
But don’t file it under Adult contemporary. “ I really fucking hate adult rock,” says Smith. “ For this album I wrote a few songs on more ‘adult’ things but when I sang them I didn’t feel comfortable. I think that the idiom that I work in doesn’t lend itself to [so called] adult themes. We do well with a particular kind of song and music. Beyond that, why bother? I read books. I talk to people. Putting everything I think about into songs would be kind of stupid really. It would be living my life out in song.”
But with lyrics like “the last day of summer” and “one last time before it’s over” one can’t help but wonder if this is the fond farewell? Smith seems indecisive. ”When I turned thirty I promised myself that at forty I would do something else. I would like to hold true to that. I want to do is a solo album. The songs are done and I’m desperate to do it. [I’ve told the band] it won’t include them and I suppose we’ve never done that before. But in a few years I might think it would be cool to do another Cure album.
“I think [Bloodflowers] is the best album we’ve ever done,” he adds. “I had more fun making it [than any other record.] It would be really hollow if in the same breath I say “I’m never doing it again.” [If] I enjoyed it so much and think it’s so good why wouldn’t I want to do it again? Never say never.” Smith says, trailing off. Right now he’s more concerned with getting through the months of touring they have scheduled through the end of summer.
The Cure play bigger shows today than in the post-punk days. They will play some eighties favorites live, but their concerts are dominated by newer material. The Cure is not a nostalgia act. Their fanbase is diverse, much of it young and rabid. The World Wide Web is crowded with Cure fan sites where tapes, photos and paraphernalia are swapped, lyrics are analyzed, guitar tabs are posted and brushes with the band recounted. (Even meeting former band mate Laurence Tolhurst’s brother merits an essay.) It’s not quite a teeny-bopper set but many Cure fans were in diapers when the band began recording its most innovative work. “After about 1989 the audience, [which until then] was about the same age as us, started to get younger,” Smith says noting that graying temples are also not unusual at their shows. “The things I write about, the things that bother me, are things that people start worrying about in their teens and twenties. [A lot of people] kind of forget about them [they think they’ll] never get the answers so why worry about them. It’s a notion of growing up. I’ve never been able to grow up and out of questioning things.” And contrary to popular perception, Smith points out, their audiences are not entirely dominated by Robert Smith look-alikes.
And that brings us to the Goths: something about the underground fashions of Smith and his contemporaries circa 1983 took root. Today, the look, together with suitably dark music and a couple of Anne Rice books, has become an entrenched teen sub-culture populated by the dramatic, disaffected and pseudo-suicidal. “I think we appeal to people who don’t fit in,” says Smith. Both Smith and Siouxsie Sioux (whose style Smith is said to have one-upped when he toured with the Banshees in 1983) have disputed that they were “goth”. However, Smith will admit that he has always delighted in using fashion to get a rise out of people. He tells me he often wore “weird second hand clothes” to school just to see what the teachers would do. “As the group’s become popular and as I’ve become more known I’ve had less desire to do it,” says Smith dressed today in black cargo pants and a baggy black shirt. “ When I was younger and unknown I probably did want to be noticed. But when I started getting notice I thought I don’t need to do this anymore.”
So, how does he account for the hair? The face-paint? “It always comes across slightly ludicrous [when I say this] because of what I look like and what I do,” he admits. But Smith is notoriously stage-shy. He usually needs a drink or two for courage (A taping of VH1’s Hard Rock Live in New York City was the first show Smith had ever done sober) and he must wear makeup. “It’s a ritual. When I put the makeup on then I can perform. It affects me psychologically. It makes me louder. I use makeup and the whole look in the way that thousands of people have through thousands of years –[I use it to perform]. It liberates [me].”
Smith will not be freed from his designation as King Goth anytime soon. His clones and the media will make sure of it. No matter how many ecstatically happy songs he sings he will always be the mopey English guy with the weirdo hair and smudged make-up who pens soundtracks for depression in the popular mind. It drives him crazy. When he shaved his head ten years ago MTV ran hourly news stories. (“It was like completely insane. “) In Mike Leigh’s film Career Girls, he was the unchanged man in a changed world. (“I resented that.”) But he’s beyond ridicule. In South Park’s first season, he saved the world from a mechanical Barbra Streisand. It’s who we want him to be. Robert Smith is iconographic.
(This may be a different edit than the published article.)
Goth Talk
by Margie Borschke
Robert Smith looks unhappy. He is posing for a photo outside his house in England, wearing a baggy tracksuit top, dark trousers, a mop of limp black hair and no makeup. His smile is forced. Next to him stands some blonde kid from Germany, beaming like a maniac. The picture is posted on the website, the Holy Hour, under the heading My Cure Holidays. It was snapped early last fall shortly after Smith finished recording Bloodflowers, the latest (and rumored to be last) album from The Cure.
When I meet up with Smith at the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Manhattan he looks somewhat less beleaguered. Just slightly. As lead singer, chief songwriter and the Cure’s key fixture (12 different musicians have been a part of the band’s 23 year history; Smith and guitarist Simon Gallup are the only constants), he is the band’s obvious though reluctant spokesman. He hates fans that show up on his doorstep and finds interviews and photo shoots almost as tedious. Smith, despite having never worked any other job, save a week with the post office (sacked) and a month as a gardener, is still uncomfortable with pop stardom. He blushes when asked for an autograph and is genuinely upset by fans who camp out on the beach near his house, smoking dope and playing Cure songs.
Robert Smith is forty now, married for 11 years to his long-time girlfriend Mary Poole, and most definitely grown-up. He lives in a quiet seaside town near Brighton and speaks more often of afternoons with his young nephews and nieces than of wild nights on the town. He has a tidy fortune tucked away. He seems happy. Even content. Actually, he’s very much the sensible Englishman. Yes, his hair is lightly teased, his lipstick is smeared, he’s wearing eyeliner and enormous club-kid black boots, but we should all be so outrageously mature at mid-life. And yes, he can still find beauty—and a moody pop song—in melancholia
Elektra, the Cure’s US record company, has rented a suite at the Chelsea Hotel to give the interviews some “atmosphere”. There are more models around than junkies these days, but the Chelsea remains as eccentric and downwardly fashionable as ever. Smith, who spends enough time in hotels to value comfortable beds over hip quotients, isn’t staying here. Actually, he doesn’t seem the least bit enchanted with the place. “It’s all very Elvis Costello, isn’t it,” he deadpans, poking about the sunny suite, whose cracked plaster walls are painted a jarring lime green. He sinks into an armchair covered in mauve velvet. “Fun-kay.” He says, sarcastically. It seems Robert Smith, onetime innovator of freakish streetwear trends, is suspicious of down-market glamour.
The Cure are not just a success, they’re a phenomenon. In over two decades they have recorded 23 albums and sold millions, all with next to no help from commercial radio. They’re among the most bootlegged bands of all time, up there in Grateful Dead territory, a distinction that speaks volumes about their fans’ devotion. Yet they have never succumbed to commercial pressures—they don’t chase trends and they will not allow their music to be used in advertisements. “We’re so morally right,” Smith laughs. “I am protective about the music. I never let anyone get in the way of it or tell me what we should be doing.” Hence the band does not employ a producer or a business manager. Smith is content to do the dirty work himself. He even has a hand in their website. Smith doesn’t come off as a control freak so much as someone who stayed true to his DIY roots. (Long before Jarvis bared his bottom at the BRITS, Smith declared the ceremony a farce after being named band of the year in 1990.) Success has made him neither arrogant nor jaded. What other Platinum selling band would place a Melody Maker ad when they needed a new drummer? “Famous band needs drummer,” read Jason Cooper, the band’s current drummer, in 1994. “No metalheads. ” The man is so damn grounded.
The Cure started out as a high school band in Crawley, a sleepy suburb 30 Miles outside London. His childhood friend Laurence “Lol” Tolhurst played drums and Simon Gallup, the town’s only other punk, guitar. Smith sang and played keyboards. It was 1976. They were The Easy Cure. Their first gig was at a school-sponsored jazz/fusion festival. They played nothing of the sort. “We played a Bowie song, a Thin Lizzy song, and a Hendrix song,” Smith remembers, smiling. “The rest of it was our sort of punk stuff which was really quite bad, although we did do Killing an Arab.”
“We actually had a singer for that concert,” He continues. “His older brother had a van [and we needed transport] so he got to sing the covers. It was peculiar. He was so scared about the audience that he actually did his bit of the show wearing a crash helmet. He thought they would throw bottles.” Mostly they smashed chairs and scratched cars out in the parking lot. “It was the dawning of punk in the suburbs.” Smith shrugs. His non-jazz/fusion playing ass was temporarily suspended.
England in the late seventies and early eighties was most definitely not swinging. There was no work. London was mired in riots. Thatcher came to power. But from the hopelessness, emerged an underground youth scene that found inspiration in everything falling apart around them. There was nothing else to do, they thought, so why not make some art. Smith looks back on these days fondly. “The climate was pretty bad but the advantage was that when I left school there was no work and I was able to go on the dole for over a year. You had to attend one job interview a month and everyone used to go barefoot so they’d get another month. I bought a second hand fur coat to wear to interviews. Just one look—Bare feet and a fur coat and people think DRUGS!.” He laughs. “[I sat] home and wrote songs.” The support bought the band the time they needed to get a demo tape together. Now a foursome with Michael Dempsey on bass, they played the clubs and developed a following. By 1979 they’d released their first record, Three Imaginary Boys (1980’s Boy’s Don’t Cry in America.)
Their first single, Killing an Arab, a bit of punk-pop based on Camus’ novel the Stranger, charted and Boys Don’t Cry, a new wave-ish pop song, was a minor hit that same year. But it was the single A Forest (1980) a minimalist atmospheric song that hearlded the darker mood that came to be associated with the band. This gloomy sound, dubbed post-punk, struck a chord with the youth in the UK. After all, they were all on the dole.
The Cure remained underground—famous to a few. They lived hand to mouth—they couldn’t even move to London until 1982. When they missed the last train, they slept on the studio floor. If the record company gave them cash for a hotel they spent it in the pub. They played in clubs, drank heavily, dressed like inspired freaks, and did things on their own terms. “We didn’t really sell that many records then.” Smith remembers. “When we were doing Faith (1981) and Pornography (1982) no one ever came to see us. We only kept going because we didn’t really need anything [except] the opportunity to make another record. We always sold just enough in order to pay for the next record.”
The US didn’t pay much attention. The cheerier singles Let’s Go to Bed and the Lovecats made some waves in 1982 but it wasn’t until 1985’s Head on the Door, a melodic pop album, that the band’s popularity gelled. Both their accessible lighthearted follow-up, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987) and 1989’s Disintegration, described by one critic as “a monumentally depressing album that mentioned death in almost every song”, garnered more commercial and critical attention stateside. After Disintegration, however, Smith was worn out. He had just turned thirty, spent much of the Disintegration tour smashed and had to fire Tolhurst for being drunk since 1982. He told reporters it was over. 5 albums followed. Each one purportedly the last. By 1997, there was enough material for Galore, a second collection of singles, starting where the first retrospective Standing on a Beach (Staring at the Sea on CD 1986) left off.
The Cure has a far more varied sound than the band is given credit. Just think, they are simultaneously known for their minimalist pop (the Lovecats, Close To Me), their brooding atmospherics (almost all of the Pornography and Faith) and, of course, their layered rolling guitars (In Between Days). The Cure, themselves, have never been that gloomy—making something beautiful out of hopelessness and despair is itself an optimistic act. And there are far more upbeat and whimsical songs, both in spirit and lyrically, than their dour reputation would have you imagine. (After all, Smith is a man who sang “The Sun is up/I’m so happy I could scream.”) The tie that binds it all together is Smith’s vocals. His voice is a paradox—at once piercing and deep and passionate to the point of effortlessness, there’s always a moment where it sounds as if he might lose control. That’s the joy of it.
Bloodflowers, out this month, is a serious record. One of the songs is based on an Iain Banks novel; many others are preoccupied with loss. Smith is the first to admit there is not a single radio-friendly tune on the album. Apart from the melodrama of the title track (“These flowers will always die!” he screams, surely to the delight of some sullen chick wearing too much kohl) the album is populated by assured contemplative songs, all written in a noticeably mature voice. “Over the last three albums I’ve written songs that expressed more questions that come with experience,” Smith says of the record’s tone. “ There is a kind of world weariness that it probably rings truer [now] because I am older and more experienced.“
But don’t file it under Adult contemporary. “ I really fucking hate adult rock,” says Smith. “ For this album I wrote a few songs on more ‘adult’ things but when I sang them I didn’t feel comfortable. I think that the idiom that I work in doesn’t lend itself to [so called] adult themes. We do well with a particular kind of song and music. Beyond that, why bother? I read books. I talk to people. Putting everything I think about into songs would be kind of stupid really. It would be living my life out in song.”
But with lyrics like “the last day of summer” and “one last time before it’s over” one can’t help but wonder if this is the fond farewell? Smith seems indecisive. ”When I turned thirty I promised myself that at forty I would do something else. I would like to hold true to that. I want to do is a solo album. The songs are done and I’m desperate to do it. [I’ve told the band] it won’t include them and I suppose we’ve never done that before. But in a few years I might think it would be cool to do another Cure album.
“I think [Bloodflowers] is the best album we’ve ever done,” he adds. “I had more fun making it [than any other record.] It would be really hollow if in the same breath I say “I’m never doing it again.” [If] I enjoyed it so much and think it’s so good why wouldn’t I want to do it again? Never say never.” Smith says, trailing off. Right now he’s more concerned with getting through the months of touring they have scheduled through the end of summer.
The Cure play bigger shows today than in the post-punk days. They will play some eighties favorites live, but their concerts are dominated by newer material. The Cure is not a nostalgia act. Their fanbase is diverse, much of it young and rabid. The World Wide Web is crowded with Cure fan sites where tapes, photos and paraphernalia are swapped, lyrics are analyzed, guitar tabs are posted and brushes with the band recounted. (Even meeting former band mate Laurence Tolhurst’s brother merits an essay.) It’s not quite a teeny-bopper set but many Cure fans were in diapers when the band began recording its most innovative work. “After about 1989 the audience, [which until then] was about the same age as us, started to get younger,” Smith says noting that graying temples are also not unusual at their shows. “The things I write about, the things that bother me, are things that people start worrying about in their teens and twenties. [A lot of people] kind of forget about them [they think they’ll] never get the answers so why worry about them. It’s a notion of growing up. I’ve never been able to grow up and out of questioning things.” And contrary to popular perception, Smith points out, their audiences are not entirely dominated by Robert Smith look-alikes.
And that brings us to the Goths: something about the underground fashions of Smith and his contemporaries circa 1983 took root. Today, the look, together with suitably dark music and a couple of Anne Rice books, has become an entrenched teen sub-culture populated by the dramatic, disaffected and pseudo-suicidal. “I think we appeal to people who don’t fit in,” says Smith. Both Smith and Siouxsie Sioux (whose style Smith is said to have one-upped when he toured with the Banshees in 1983) have disputed that they were “goth”. However, Smith will admit that he has always delighted in using fashion to get a rise out of people. He tells me he often wore “weird second hand clothes” to school just to see what the teachers would do. “As the group’s become popular and as I’ve become more known I’ve had less desire to do it,” says Smith dressed today in black cargo pants and a baggy black shirt. “ When I was younger and unknown I probably did want to be noticed. But when I started getting notice I thought I don’t need to do this anymore.”
So, how does he account for the hair? The face-paint? “It always comes across slightly ludicrous [when I say this] because of what I look like and what I do,” he admits. But Smith is notoriously stage-shy. He usually needs a drink or two for courage (A taping of VH1’s Hard Rock Live in New York City was the first show Smith had ever done sober) and he must wear makeup. “It’s a ritual. When I put the makeup on then I can perform. It affects me psychologically. It makes me louder. I use makeup and the whole look in the way that thousands of people have through thousands of years –[I use it to perform]. It liberates [me].”
Smith will not be freed from his designation as King Goth anytime soon. His clones and the media will make sure of it. No matter how many ecstatically happy songs he sings he will always be the mopey English guy with the weirdo hair and smudged make-up who pens soundtracks for depression in the popular mind. It drives him crazy. When he shaved his head ten years ago MTV ran hourly news stories. (“It was like completely insane. “) In Mike Leigh’s film Career Girls, he was the unchanged man in a changed world. (“I resented that.”) But he’s beyond ridicule. In South Park’s first season, he saved the world from a mechanical Barbra Streisand. It’s who we want him to be. Robert Smith is iconographic.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Hooked on a Feeling: How to Make Decisions like an Expert
(This piece was written in September 2005; see bottom of page for links)
by Margie Borschke
Ten years ago, on a sunny Sydney afternoon, Shawn Callahan caught up with an old friend at a Darling Harbour café. Callahan had a lot on his mind: over the years he had become increasingly interested in what made organizations tick and a little voice was telling him to make a leap into the unknown, to start a management consulting company of his own despite the solid career he’d built for himself in the IT sector. It was a major personal decision. He was looking for advice. Instead, his friend started asking questions.
“They were really open, exploratory questions about myself, what I valued and what was important to me,” says Callahan. “I’d been mulling it over but it wasn’t until I had to say what I thought that everything changed. That was a turning point.” In almost an instant, Callahan says, his answer was clear. He’d made up his mind: he would quit his job and start his own consulting company from scratch. That was that. There was no endless chronicling and ranking of options. No decision trees. No charts. No invoking of cute acronyms like PrOACT or trying on of colourful hats. In short, none of the methods that the biz school gurus and effective decision making experts advise. Instead Callahan relied on less quantifiable techniques: storytelling, mental simulation and most of all his gut-feeling, his intuition that he was onto something big.
Today, Callahan’s Melbourne-based company, Anecdote works with corporations to manage tacit knowledge- using innovative narrative techniques and his list of clients includes major players such as IBM and BHP Bilton. “It was an excellent decision,” he says, “but it wasn’t an easy one.” Personal decisions never are. No matter how many tough decisions you make at work, big life choices always seem more arduous and more agonizing. Should you have another child? Get Married? Break up with your partner? Quit your job? Retire early? Buy a new house? Renovate? Move to another country? Sometimes even choosing what to have for dinner can seem overwhelming. Some of us put big decisions on hold, often indefinitely. Others let fate (or usually other people) make choices for us. Neither is really a good approach. We wouldn’t make judgments and choices like this in our professional lives so why are we so sloppy when comes to our own happiness, in the part of our life that matters the most?
No one has been more preoccupied with perfecting effective decision making techniques than the business world where good decisions save millions and bad ones defile the bottom line. A thriving training industry attends to the demands of commerce and government to churn out better decision makers, advocating the teaching of formal decision making techniques that are based on economic theory which sees us all as rational actors attempting to maximize utility (be it profit, happiness etc.) and behavioral psychology. The approach goes something like this: Identify your objectives and your options, gather information, evaluate and rank your options according to your objectives, take into account every uncertainty and consequence you can think of and then choose based on which option comes out ahead once you do your sums. Maximizing utility is the name of the game and while no one claims the approach is foolproof, its proponents say it can be relied on to produce good outcomes for any kind of decision be it a billion dollar business deal or where to go on your annual fishing holiday.
There’s just one problem, says Gary Klein, an American scientist who runs Klein Associates, a consulting firm in Ohio. “There’s no evidence that I’m aware of that having people apply those rules improves the quality of their decisions.” Klein’s research, chronicled in Malcolm Gladwell’s entertaining best seller Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking as well as in his own books Sources of Power and The Power of Intuition, flies in the face of traditional thinking about decision making. Structured formal decision making methods are prescriptive–they tell us how we ought to make decisions–and they’re designed to correct what is thought to be our propensity to make interpretive errors- by misreading cues in our environment–by quantifying preferences and keeping our emotions and enthusiasms in check. Klein decided to take a different tact. Rather than concern himself with how we should make decisions, he looked at how experts under stress actually do it, working not in the lab with subjects attempting unfamiliar tasks, as is often the case in cognitive and behavioral psychology, but in the field, as the action unfolds. “I realized that what was missing [from the psychological research] was expertise,” says Klein, a leader in the field of naturalistic decision making, the study of how people make decisions in real life. His first study, in 1985, looked at firefighters–it was full of surprises.
“Everything [about that study] surprised me. Nothing happened the way it was supposed to,” says Klein. (Sources of Power is the rare book that begins by chronicling all the mistakes the author’s team made and follows up with the important lessons learned.) “First, the firefighters said that they didn’t make decisions, that they just knew what to do [when faced with a situation]. Then they said that in most cases they didn’t generate more than one option and that surprised me. A decision, [by definition] means you have to prepare at least two options and they weren’t even doing that. And then, the fact that they could evaluate an option without comparing it to another one surprised me.” Experience was often the only explanation the firefighters could give (although there was one commander who claimed to have ESP.) They just knew. Says Klein, “I had to abandon my preconceptions and try to see what were they doing and how were they using their experience.”
Experts, Klein found, were not exceedingly fast at following rational rules of decision making, as some believe, instead they made their decisions in an entirely different way. They draw upon their experience, looking for recognizable patterns, to quickly assess if a situation was familiar or not. Then, based on that, they chose the first workable option they came up with, often the first thing that sprung to mind. Evaluating the effectiveness of a course of action didn’t involve gathering information and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of one approach as compared to another–there was no time for that. Instead, they evaluated the decision based solely its own merits by imagining how it would play out. If they foresaw a problem with their solution they modified it or moved onto the next idea; if not, it was full steam ahead. As Klein wrote in Sources of Power, “the emphasis is on being poised to act rather than being paralyzed until all the evaluations have been completed.”
Klein has since studied many experts who work in stressful conditions including nurses, intensive care unit teams and military strategists and time and again he has found that they all seem to break almost every rule that formal decision making advocates set forth and yet they manage to make good decisions the majority of the time. More impressive still, they manage to do so in less than optimal conditions, in situations where the stakes are high (often life or death), where their access to information is limited and while they are under a great deal of stress and time pressure.
When it came to how experts made decisions, intuition rather than reasoning, seemed to lead the way and techniques such as simulation and storytelling seemed to be far more important than rational analysis. “I realized what a tremendous strength this was,” says Klein. “And here the research community had been studying people in ways that disqualified their strengths, in ways that separated them from what makes them so effective and then they sneered at them for being so flawed.” Rather than study the weaknesses and limitations of the human capacity to make decisions, Klein set out to study the many strengths that didn’t seem to be accounted for in the dominant models of decision making and to figure out how to better train decision makers. If experts, the people who made the most effective decisions, weren’t using these techniques to make choices, Klein asked, should we really be training novices to use them?
Experts, of course, have that certain something that novices don’t: experience. Though Klein doesn’t believe that personal decisions are fundamentally different to those that experts make he admits that the issue becomes trickier because people are usually making decisions about areas where they don’t have a lot of expertise or experience. So while classic methods might be a waste of time for experts, might they be of some use to the rest of us? When we’re on unfamiliar terrain, as we often seem to be in our personal lives, surely a little rigor and reasoning could come in handy.
David A. Welch, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the author of Decisions Decisions: The Art of Effective Decision Making thinks so.
“We’re all normal human beings and normal human beings suffer from particular kinds of traps and our intuitions lead us into those traps. If at the end of the day what you really care about is maximizing something, these traps are going to lead in the wrong direction,” says Welch. An expert on international relations, Welch became interested in decision making while studying international security. “I wanted to understand why smart people make dumb decisions,” he says. He also realized how useful the information could be when individuals were faced with tough choices such as buying a house or choosing where to go to school so he sought to translate the technical jargon of rational choice theory into a language the average person who wanted to make smarter decisions could understand.
“People make bad decisions all the time because they are over hasty, they fail to consider some of the implications of what they do or they wrongly judge one alternative favorably because it reminds them of something unrelated,” says Welch. “The way the brain works leads us down the wrong path a huge proportion of the time. It doesn’t mean all your intuitions are wrong. It means that if you’re making a really important decisions and you want to be really sure you’re making the right choice then ideally what you want is to have is your intuitions agree with a more structured approach. A good proportion of the time your intuition and your exercise will agree and you will have the satisfaction of being even more confident.” Though the technique he advocates could theoretically be used for any kind of decision, even matters of the heart, Welch says you have to consider the time it takes to go through the exercise. (Plus, he says, you risk being labeled unromantic if you start charting out your intimate relationships.) “You don’t do this every day,” says Welch. “I will go through the formal exercise maybe twice in a busy year.” Buying a house and a car were both occasions where Welch personally made the effort.
Klein, on the other hand, sees these technical exercises of limited use, even for novices.
“One reason people run to these methods [in the corporate sphere] is because they want to avoid responsibility,” says Klein. “People are very desperate to find an analytical method that gets them off the hook. They don’t want to say I made that decision. They want to say look, I followed the steps so nobody can blame me.” (The rigour of this kind of analysis, he points out, can make it beneficial in situations where justifying a decision is important, for example in the political sphere where there are often many competing interests to account for and accommodate.)
“If you’re going to improve somebody’s decision making skills you’re not going to do it by improving the quality of their procedures and their analytical methods,” he says. “The advice people usually give you is don’t form any conclusions until you’ve gathered all the data. That’s bad advice because it makes you passive,” he says. But before you start counting your chickens before their hatched, think again. “Even worse than waiting, is jumping to a conclusion and sticking to it no matter what.” Klein is by no means advocating snap judgments or indulging prejudices nor does he believe you should abandon rational thought, another powerful human strength. On the contrary, he believes that deep, thoughtful reflection will improve your decision making skills. Says Klein, “The way you’re going to improve [a person’s] decision making and judgments is by improving the quality of their intuitions and that means having them reflect on decisions that they’ve made that turned out right or wrong. It means giving them more experiences. It means having them take a more active stance in developing their expertise.”
Part of developing expertise is being honest with yourself about when you’re dealing with the unfamiliar. “Novices should be less confident in their intuitions and they should explore alternative options but not in the classical way by setting up common evaluation dimensions, assigning weights to these dimensions, filling in squares all those sorts of things,” says Klein. “Instead of comparing options on a set of dimensions that is rigid, novices should imagine each option, how it might go well and how it might go poorly. They need to see how they feel about the best cases and the worst ones.” Klein trains his clients to conduct so-called pre-mortems, a sort of simulation of what would happen if everything went wrong. “You don’t just go with your enthusiasm,” he warns. “It’s about actively exploring the data and discovering relationships that allow you to learn more about a situation so that when you do have to make a choice it will be better informed because you have a deeper understanding of the dynamics.”
We need to take our intuition more seriously. Shawn Callahan believed in his in the face of difficult odds. Had he dismissed those feelings that were difficult to articulate and analyzed the situation along more traditional criteria, a career move, he thinks would have appeared to be foolhardy. Novices should be more wary of their gut-feelings, says Klein but they should not dismiss them. “Be aware that if you have to think of different options there’s a good chance that the first option you think of is going to be the best,” says Klein. “It may not be. But hold onto that. That initial impulse, when you have some basis of experience is usually pretty good and if you start analyzing too quickly, the analysis can confuse you and you will have lost your intuitive sense of what you really want to do. Pay attention to what your intuition is telling you and then do the analysis rather than vice versa.” Listen to your heart: your head will follow.
Getting Out of the Zone of Indifference
Some of us are plagued by indecision but could it be that we place too much value on choices that don’t really matter much?
“In most cases we’re faced with pretty obvious choices: Do you want to buy a really good car at a very low price or do you want to buy a mediocre car with terrible repair records at a high price? That’s not hard,” says Gary Klein, a leader in the field of naturalistic decision making. “However, the closer together we make the options the harder it gets. The toughest decisions are those where the strengths and weaknesses are almost perfectly balanced.”
“They’re also often the decisions that matter the least because the choice will be almost inconsequential. This is the zone of indifference. At this point it doesn’t matter what you choose but we are so conditioned to want to find an advantage for one option over another that we drive ourselves crazy trying to do it,” says Klein. If the goals are well defined and only the best will do–and there are such occasions-–then this is exactly the sort of task at which formal decision making methods excel. They will help you tease out the best option if you have the time. But Klein advises otherwise. “If you think you’re in the zone of indifference rather than spending another few hours or days or weeks trying to [find the optimal choice] just admit that you’re in the zone of indifference, admit that you don’t want to be trapped there and you can’t think yourself out of it. Flip a coin or something.” Move on.
Books & Links
Klein Associates
Anecdote
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (Paperback) by Gary Klein
Decisions, Decisions: The Art of Effective Decision Making (Paperback) by David A Welch
by Margie Borschke
Ten years ago, on a sunny Sydney afternoon, Shawn Callahan caught up with an old friend at a Darling Harbour café. Callahan had a lot on his mind: over the years he had become increasingly interested in what made organizations tick and a little voice was telling him to make a leap into the unknown, to start a management consulting company of his own despite the solid career he’d built for himself in the IT sector. It was a major personal decision. He was looking for advice. Instead, his friend started asking questions.
“They were really open, exploratory questions about myself, what I valued and what was important to me,” says Callahan. “I’d been mulling it over but it wasn’t until I had to say what I thought that everything changed. That was a turning point.” In almost an instant, Callahan says, his answer was clear. He’d made up his mind: he would quit his job and start his own consulting company from scratch. That was that. There was no endless chronicling and ranking of options. No decision trees. No charts. No invoking of cute acronyms like PrOACT or trying on of colourful hats. In short, none of the methods that the biz school gurus and effective decision making experts advise. Instead Callahan relied on less quantifiable techniques: storytelling, mental simulation and most of all his gut-feeling, his intuition that he was onto something big.
Today, Callahan’s Melbourne-based company, Anecdote works with corporations to manage tacit knowledge- using innovative narrative techniques and his list of clients includes major players such as IBM and BHP Bilton. “It was an excellent decision,” he says, “but it wasn’t an easy one.” Personal decisions never are. No matter how many tough decisions you make at work, big life choices always seem more arduous and more agonizing. Should you have another child? Get Married? Break up with your partner? Quit your job? Retire early? Buy a new house? Renovate? Move to another country? Sometimes even choosing what to have for dinner can seem overwhelming. Some of us put big decisions on hold, often indefinitely. Others let fate (or usually other people) make choices for us. Neither is really a good approach. We wouldn’t make judgments and choices like this in our professional lives so why are we so sloppy when comes to our own happiness, in the part of our life that matters the most?
No one has been more preoccupied with perfecting effective decision making techniques than the business world where good decisions save millions and bad ones defile the bottom line. A thriving training industry attends to the demands of commerce and government to churn out better decision makers, advocating the teaching of formal decision making techniques that are based on economic theory which sees us all as rational actors attempting to maximize utility (be it profit, happiness etc.) and behavioral psychology. The approach goes something like this: Identify your objectives and your options, gather information, evaluate and rank your options according to your objectives, take into account every uncertainty and consequence you can think of and then choose based on which option comes out ahead once you do your sums. Maximizing utility is the name of the game and while no one claims the approach is foolproof, its proponents say it can be relied on to produce good outcomes for any kind of decision be it a billion dollar business deal or where to go on your annual fishing holiday.
There’s just one problem, says Gary Klein, an American scientist who runs Klein Associates, a consulting firm in Ohio. “There’s no evidence that I’m aware of that having people apply those rules improves the quality of their decisions.” Klein’s research, chronicled in Malcolm Gladwell’s entertaining best seller Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking as well as in his own books Sources of Power and The Power of Intuition, flies in the face of traditional thinking about decision making. Structured formal decision making methods are prescriptive–they tell us how we ought to make decisions–and they’re designed to correct what is thought to be our propensity to make interpretive errors- by misreading cues in our environment–by quantifying preferences and keeping our emotions and enthusiasms in check. Klein decided to take a different tact. Rather than concern himself with how we should make decisions, he looked at how experts under stress actually do it, working not in the lab with subjects attempting unfamiliar tasks, as is often the case in cognitive and behavioral psychology, but in the field, as the action unfolds. “I realized that what was missing [from the psychological research] was expertise,” says Klein, a leader in the field of naturalistic decision making, the study of how people make decisions in real life. His first study, in 1985, looked at firefighters–it was full of surprises.
“Everything [about that study] surprised me. Nothing happened the way it was supposed to,” says Klein. (Sources of Power is the rare book that begins by chronicling all the mistakes the author’s team made and follows up with the important lessons learned.) “First, the firefighters said that they didn’t make decisions, that they just knew what to do [when faced with a situation]. Then they said that in most cases they didn’t generate more than one option and that surprised me. A decision, [by definition] means you have to prepare at least two options and they weren’t even doing that. And then, the fact that they could evaluate an option without comparing it to another one surprised me.” Experience was often the only explanation the firefighters could give (although there was one commander who claimed to have ESP.) They just knew. Says Klein, “I had to abandon my preconceptions and try to see what were they doing and how were they using their experience.”
Experts, Klein found, were not exceedingly fast at following rational rules of decision making, as some believe, instead they made their decisions in an entirely different way. They draw upon their experience, looking for recognizable patterns, to quickly assess if a situation was familiar or not. Then, based on that, they chose the first workable option they came up with, often the first thing that sprung to mind. Evaluating the effectiveness of a course of action didn’t involve gathering information and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of one approach as compared to another–there was no time for that. Instead, they evaluated the decision based solely its own merits by imagining how it would play out. If they foresaw a problem with their solution they modified it or moved onto the next idea; if not, it was full steam ahead. As Klein wrote in Sources of Power, “the emphasis is on being poised to act rather than being paralyzed until all the evaluations have been completed.”
Klein has since studied many experts who work in stressful conditions including nurses, intensive care unit teams and military strategists and time and again he has found that they all seem to break almost every rule that formal decision making advocates set forth and yet they manage to make good decisions the majority of the time. More impressive still, they manage to do so in less than optimal conditions, in situations where the stakes are high (often life or death), where their access to information is limited and while they are under a great deal of stress and time pressure.
When it came to how experts made decisions, intuition rather than reasoning, seemed to lead the way and techniques such as simulation and storytelling seemed to be far more important than rational analysis. “I realized what a tremendous strength this was,” says Klein. “And here the research community had been studying people in ways that disqualified their strengths, in ways that separated them from what makes them so effective and then they sneered at them for being so flawed.” Rather than study the weaknesses and limitations of the human capacity to make decisions, Klein set out to study the many strengths that didn’t seem to be accounted for in the dominant models of decision making and to figure out how to better train decision makers. If experts, the people who made the most effective decisions, weren’t using these techniques to make choices, Klein asked, should we really be training novices to use them?
Experts, of course, have that certain something that novices don’t: experience. Though Klein doesn’t believe that personal decisions are fundamentally different to those that experts make he admits that the issue becomes trickier because people are usually making decisions about areas where they don’t have a lot of expertise or experience. So while classic methods might be a waste of time for experts, might they be of some use to the rest of us? When we’re on unfamiliar terrain, as we often seem to be in our personal lives, surely a little rigor and reasoning could come in handy.
David A. Welch, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the author of Decisions Decisions: The Art of Effective Decision Making thinks so.
“We’re all normal human beings and normal human beings suffer from particular kinds of traps and our intuitions lead us into those traps. If at the end of the day what you really care about is maximizing something, these traps are going to lead in the wrong direction,” says Welch. An expert on international relations, Welch became interested in decision making while studying international security. “I wanted to understand why smart people make dumb decisions,” he says. He also realized how useful the information could be when individuals were faced with tough choices such as buying a house or choosing where to go to school so he sought to translate the technical jargon of rational choice theory into a language the average person who wanted to make smarter decisions could understand.
“People make bad decisions all the time because they are over hasty, they fail to consider some of the implications of what they do or they wrongly judge one alternative favorably because it reminds them of something unrelated,” says Welch. “The way the brain works leads us down the wrong path a huge proportion of the time. It doesn’t mean all your intuitions are wrong. It means that if you’re making a really important decisions and you want to be really sure you’re making the right choice then ideally what you want is to have is your intuitions agree with a more structured approach. A good proportion of the time your intuition and your exercise will agree and you will have the satisfaction of being even more confident.” Though the technique he advocates could theoretically be used for any kind of decision, even matters of the heart, Welch says you have to consider the time it takes to go through the exercise. (Plus, he says, you risk being labeled unromantic if you start charting out your intimate relationships.) “You don’t do this every day,” says Welch. “I will go through the formal exercise maybe twice in a busy year.” Buying a house and a car were both occasions where Welch personally made the effort.
Klein, on the other hand, sees these technical exercises of limited use, even for novices.
“One reason people run to these methods [in the corporate sphere] is because they want to avoid responsibility,” says Klein. “People are very desperate to find an analytical method that gets them off the hook. They don’t want to say I made that decision. They want to say look, I followed the steps so nobody can blame me.” (The rigour of this kind of analysis, he points out, can make it beneficial in situations where justifying a decision is important, for example in the political sphere where there are often many competing interests to account for and accommodate.)
“If you’re going to improve somebody’s decision making skills you’re not going to do it by improving the quality of their procedures and their analytical methods,” he says. “The advice people usually give you is don’t form any conclusions until you’ve gathered all the data. That’s bad advice because it makes you passive,” he says. But before you start counting your chickens before their hatched, think again. “Even worse than waiting, is jumping to a conclusion and sticking to it no matter what.” Klein is by no means advocating snap judgments or indulging prejudices nor does he believe you should abandon rational thought, another powerful human strength. On the contrary, he believes that deep, thoughtful reflection will improve your decision making skills. Says Klein, “The way you’re going to improve [a person’s] decision making and judgments is by improving the quality of their intuitions and that means having them reflect on decisions that they’ve made that turned out right or wrong. It means giving them more experiences. It means having them take a more active stance in developing their expertise.”
Part of developing expertise is being honest with yourself about when you’re dealing with the unfamiliar. “Novices should be less confident in their intuitions and they should explore alternative options but not in the classical way by setting up common evaluation dimensions, assigning weights to these dimensions, filling in squares all those sorts of things,” says Klein. “Instead of comparing options on a set of dimensions that is rigid, novices should imagine each option, how it might go well and how it might go poorly. They need to see how they feel about the best cases and the worst ones.” Klein trains his clients to conduct so-called pre-mortems, a sort of simulation of what would happen if everything went wrong. “You don’t just go with your enthusiasm,” he warns. “It’s about actively exploring the data and discovering relationships that allow you to learn more about a situation so that when you do have to make a choice it will be better informed because you have a deeper understanding of the dynamics.”
We need to take our intuition more seriously. Shawn Callahan believed in his in the face of difficult odds. Had he dismissed those feelings that were difficult to articulate and analyzed the situation along more traditional criteria, a career move, he thinks would have appeared to be foolhardy. Novices should be more wary of their gut-feelings, says Klein but they should not dismiss them. “Be aware that if you have to think of different options there’s a good chance that the first option you think of is going to be the best,” says Klein. “It may not be. But hold onto that. That initial impulse, when you have some basis of experience is usually pretty good and if you start analyzing too quickly, the analysis can confuse you and you will have lost your intuitive sense of what you really want to do. Pay attention to what your intuition is telling you and then do the analysis rather than vice versa.” Listen to your heart: your head will follow.
Getting Out of the Zone of Indifference
Some of us are plagued by indecision but could it be that we place too much value on choices that don’t really matter much?
“In most cases we’re faced with pretty obvious choices: Do you want to buy a really good car at a very low price or do you want to buy a mediocre car with terrible repair records at a high price? That’s not hard,” says Gary Klein, a leader in the field of naturalistic decision making. “However, the closer together we make the options the harder it gets. The toughest decisions are those where the strengths and weaknesses are almost perfectly balanced.”
“They’re also often the decisions that matter the least because the choice will be almost inconsequential. This is the zone of indifference. At this point it doesn’t matter what you choose but we are so conditioned to want to find an advantage for one option over another that we drive ourselves crazy trying to do it,” says Klein. If the goals are well defined and only the best will do–and there are such occasions-–then this is exactly the sort of task at which formal decision making methods excel. They will help you tease out the best option if you have the time. But Klein advises otherwise. “If you think you’re in the zone of indifference rather than spending another few hours or days or weeks trying to [find the optimal choice] just admit that you’re in the zone of indifference, admit that you don’t want to be trapped there and you can’t think yourself out of it. Flip a coin or something.” Move on.
Books & Links
Klein Associates
Anecdote
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (Paperback) by Gary Klein
Decisions, Decisions: The Art of Effective Decision Making (Paperback) by David A Welch
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
EXTRAORDINARY ALIEN: Techno DJ Richie Hawtin challenges borders
First published in Saturday Night, February 1, 1999
By Margie Borschke
Richie Hawtin is driving his late-model silver BMW down familiar streets,
through the modest tree-lined neighbourhoods of Windsor, Ontario. As we turn
onto Huron Church Road, heading north, the maple trees give way to fast-food
joints, and we cruise towards the Detroit River, past the strip malls and
the Assumption CathoLic Church. Hawtin and I are on our way to the United
States, which around here isn't really that big a deal, for most people. The
border between Michigan and Ontario is a line that the residents of Windsor
cross often, to shop, to work, to go out for dinner. But for Richie Hawtin,
the border has proved more complicated.
Hawtin is a DJ, and a world-famous one. It's a job title that has gone
through as many evolutions and permutations as popular music itself: think
of Wolfman Jack spinning platters in "American Graffiti," then Shep
Pettibone keeping the disco beat alive at Studio 54, then Terminator X
scratching and mixing for Public Enemy. Hawtin, who performs around the
globe and can command thousands of dollars for a single night's work,
represents the latest incarnation of the DJ; as "Plastikman," he's become
one of the world's most successful practitioners of the musical style known
as techno, the fast-paced, funky electronic dance music that was born in
Detroit's decaying downtown and spawned a revolution in youth culture in
Britain and Europe - and to a lesser extent in North America - in the late
'80s and early '90s.
Right across the river, Detroit was like a second home to Hawtin when he was
growing up. Now, as we pull up to the tollbooth on the Canadian side of the
Ambassador Bridge, we can see across the water the towering Renaissance
Center, a gasp of architectural optimism that looms above the abandoned
streets of Detroit's inner city. Hawtin, twenty-eight, dressed in a T-shirt,
Carhart work pants, and his trademark Belgian-designed black plastic
glasses, pays the toll, and we roll onto the bridge towards America.
High above the icy chop of the Detroit River, Hawtin points eastward to an
elegant but crumbling neoclassical structure on the opposite shore. "That's
the old train station," he says. Abandoned by Amtrak in 1988, the station is
typical of the faded glory and tragic neglect for which Detroit is now
infamous. But Richie sees more there than just a faded past; he sees the
potential for a raucous, heartthumping present. This is the sort of deserted
building that is ideal for a really loud rave, the huge, all-night dance
parties that are the signature event of the techno world. "Someone tried to
have a party there once," he says, "but it got shut down before it even
began."
Hawtin arrived in Windsor with his parents in 1979, an immigrant from a
small town near Oxford, England. Coming to Canada, nine-year-old Richie had
expected more mountains and bears and less American-style industrialization.
"As soon as we came out of the airport in Windsor it was big cars, concrete,
and wires seemingly everywhere," he remembers."I didn't really see a
difference between Canadians and Americans then. It was all kind of one
thing in my head."
As a boy, Hawtin would lie on his bed in his parents' house in LaSalle, a
suburb just south of Windsor, and listen to cutting-edge music on Detroit
radio. Eclectic shows hosted by the Electrifyin' Mojo and the Wizard
featured proto-techno bands like Kraftwerk, European industrial bands like
Nitzer Ebb, as well as electro, funk, and early house music. It was music
that suggested a world unlike anything he had experienced, and Hawtin knew
he wanted in. His earliest stabs at DJing were at an underage club in
Windsor, and even as a teenager he was frequenting now-legendary Detroit
clubs like the Music Institute. Soon he was working both sides of the
border, and he quickly became a presence in Detroit's underground party
scene. By the time he was eighteen, he had a weekly DJ gig at the Shelter,
another dub in downtown Detroit. "If you want anything that is a bit out of
the ordinary or different around here, you've got to go to Detroit," Hawtin
explains.
It was also in Detroit that Hawtin met fellow Canadian John Acquaviva, a
London, Ontario-based DJ who is his sometime collaborator and long-time
business partner. Together they launched Plus 8, an independent record label
that, along with Hawtin's new label, Minus, owns Hawtin's catalogue - four
albums and twenty-five singles, many recorded under the names of various
alter egos, like F.U.S.E., Robotman, Up!, and Xenon. Hawtin and Acquaviva's
first release, in 1990, "States of Mind," sparked some controversy: printed
on the white label was simply the slogan "THE FUTURE SOUND OF DETROIT." Some
members of the Detroit techno community - which was then predominantly black
- resented a couple of white kids from Canada making such a bold assertion.
"To us, it was our future sound of Detroit," Hawtin explains. "[Detroit] was
where I DJ'd, where I drew my inspiration from, and where it really started
to happen for me. [We took] the sound of Detroit and mutated it into our own
form."
In his early years, it was illegal for Hawtin to DJ in the United States
because he lacked the required work visa. When he tried, at eighteen, to
sort things out, an immigration lawyer told him he didn't qualify. Anyone
could be a DJ, the lawyer said; wasn't it just a matter of playing one
record after another? If Hawtin played a party in Detroit, he added, he
would be taking away an American job.
For years after that, every time Hawtin crossed the border into the U.S., he
didn't mention that he was going to DJ or host a party on the other side. He
was always "visiting friends," "going to dinner," "catching a show." And he
always made it across with a smile and a wave. Then, on April 28, 1995, on
his way to New York City to perform live for 2,000 people at the base of the
Brooklyn Bridge, Hawtin was stopped at the border. Perhaps his shaved head
and car full of electronic equipment prompted suspicion. (After all, the
Oklahoma City bombing had happened just a week before.) Maybe the city's
anti-rave task force was onto him; or maybe the officer was just in a bad
mood that day. But during the ensuing search the U.S. border guards opened a
letter that Hawtin had forgotten to post, in which he noted the date he was
to appear at the rave in Brooklyn. Hawtin, of course, hadn't mentioned it to
the guards; he had told them he was going to see a friend.
U.S. immigration officers questioned Hawtin for over three hours. "It was
pretty nasty," Hawtin says. "This guy was like, 'Tell us the truth and maybe
we can work this out.' They threatened to throw me in a cell. So, the stupid
thing I did was, I told them the truth. I wrote it down in a statement and
as soon as I'd done that they were all smiles. They told me to go home, and
that I shouldn't ever expect to get back into the States again."
The ban was a huge blow to Hawtin. Detroit was more to him than a place to
have good parties. It was also his muse. The Plastikman records, Hawtin
says, were reflections on experiences he'd had in Detroit, and without
access to the city - its diversity, its underground life, its youth culture,
all thriving in a place that everyone else seemed to have written off -
Plastikman didn't exist. "It was a very strange time," he says. "Besides my
family, I didn't have that many people in my life from Windsor. Everyone I'd
been doing parties with was in Detroit. My girlfriend was there. My friends
were there. Everything. Access to all these different things, all my
inspirations - I was cut off from it all. My world got a lot smaller that
day."
The situation forced Hawtin to re-examine his artistic ideas and goals.
"Richie had some profound moments," says Acquaviva. "He got a lot wiser and
his perspective changed." So did his music. Before the incident Hawtin had
begun recording material for what was to be his final Plastikman album, but
afterward, he lost interest. "Being banned gave me time to look to other
things for inspiration," he says. His music became more spare and
contemplative; it was still electronic, but now was increasingly
experimental and less danceable. He began a series called "Concept 1,"
releasing a new single each month for all of 1996. The results were nothing
you'd hear on a dance floor. Then, in 1998, he released two more moody
albums: "Consumed," a composerly minimalist soundscape without a single
dance beat; and "Artifakt [BC]," a more pared-down continuation of his
earlier work. Both were heavily influenced by what Hawtin describes as his
"exile" from Detroit." Artifakt' is about the exile," he explains, "whereas
'Consumed' is a product of that exile. It wouldn't have happened without
[my] getting thrown out of the States."
The treatment Hawtin received at the hands of the American government and
the subsequent support he discovered in his hometown also aroused a
nationalistic pride in Hawtin that he was unaware he possessed. It's part of
the reason that, for the first time, a Plastikman record received a Canadian
release. (The others, though recorded in Canada, were available only as U.S.
imports.) "It was one of the worst experiences of my life," he says of the
ordeal. "I wouldn't want to go through it again. But it really made me who I
am today. Maybe without it, I would still just be doing parties and making
dance tracks. I wouldn't want that either."
In 1996, one and a half years and thousands of dollars in legal fees after
it began, Hawtin's exile came to an end. With four critically acclaimed
Plastikman albums under his belt and his face on the cover of just about all
of the world's major dance-music magazines, the U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service agreed that Hawtin was "an alien of extraordinary
ability," or a "non-immigrant, status O-1." He is now free to enter the U.S.
to visit his girlfriend, to hang out with friends, and even to work.
Today, as we approach the American side of the bridge, Hawtin adjusts his
glasses and surveys the possibilities. There are no lines painted on the
pavement at U.S. Customs. Cars and trucks cut erratically across the
would-be lanes, each driver choosing the queue that seems both most likely
to move and least likely to result in a strip search or the dismantling of
one's car. Hawtin veers a couple of lanes to the right. He's placed his bet.
The car ahead of us pulls away from the customs booth, and Hawtin, taking
his foot off the brake, pulls up to be questioned. He sticks his head out of
the window and hands his passport, which is British despite his twenty years
in Canada, to the inspection agent. The plan today is that I will tag along
with Hawtin while he goes about his business, visiting his sound engineers
to master some tracks, meeting with his event co-ordinator, and doing
various label-related chores - all perfectly legal, legitimate pursuits
under the terms of Hawtin's visa. Still, when the middle-aged officer looks
up from Hawtin's passport and asks, "Where are you going?" Hawtin's answer
has the ring of experience.
"To have lunch with a friend," he says.
The guard waves us through.
The big event in Richie's life this week, as is often the case, is a party.
This one is called "M1," and it's going to take place Friday night. As late
as Thursday, M1 remains shrouded in mystery. As we drive around Detroit and
Windsor throughout the week, doing errands - cutting records here, dropping
off files for the printer there - Hawtin hands out flyers, invitations that
list only a date, time, Web address, and phone number. Who, what, and where
are conspicuously absent. Hawtin's parties are famous, and the organizers
want to keep this one intimate. At his last big party he played host to
1,500 people; the space they've rented out for Friday will hold only 400.
Despite the secrecy, the party is already being talked about, albeit
cryptically, on e-mail lists and among local scenesters. Some kids will
drive hundreds of miles to attend; others will fly in from places as distant
as San Francisco and Las Vegas for the night. "Show up early," Hawtin tells
everybody he hands a flyer to, though in the rave world, "early" is a
relative concept: the party is scheduled to begin at midnight and go until 6
a.m.
At 10 a.m. on Friday, the venue is announced on the information line and Web
site of Minus, one of Hawtin's two record labels. M1 is to be held at Better
Days, an after-hours club on Woodward Avenue, Detroit's main drag. We show
up late that afternoon to prepare. Hawtin retires to the DJ booth, where he
fiddles with his equipment and begins downing a steady stream of caffeinated
drinks. His set-up is complicated, as it has to be: when the rave starts,
he'll not only be mixing back and forth between records - like a regular
club DJ - but also playing his own, unreleased electronic tracks that he's
had cut into single-edition vinyl records. Over these tracks, he'll mix in
rhythms that he's programmed into his Roland 909 drum machine, adding the
occasional sample or warping the sound with his effects boxes.
Better Days has certainly seen some. Next door to the Scorpio Book Center
and its twenty-five-cent peep shows, Better Days is little more than a
thirty-by-sixty-foot cinder-block box. Its only concession to decor is a
day-glo mural of the Manhattan skyline, painted, apparently, by someone
unfamiliar with the real thing - the Brooklyn Bridge appears to cross the
wrong river, into the wrong part of town. Party-goers, however, will be
spared this bit of creative geography. Hawtin's crew is busy along long
pieces of burlap to the walls and ceding. Every inch of the room will be
covered in the stuff. It's an organic twist on a Plastikman theme: Hawtin's
nom de spin was inspired by a party space he once covered entirely in black
plastic.
Hawtin describes the parties he hosts as a reaction against the excesses
that have come to characterize the American rave scene: the ubiquitous
drugs, the long lists of big-name DJs who play short sets, the silly clothes
(think giant pants), and the even more ridiculous accessories (pacifiers,
stuffed animals, surgeons' masks, glowing wands, and hats of cartoonish
dimensions) favoured by some teenage party-goers. "I saw so many fuckin'
flowery hats and Dr. Seuss shit when I toured with Prodigy and Moby in
1992," says Hawtin, "that I just wanted to be sick. In America it's always
'More! More! More!' Flashing colours. Hats. Glo-sticks. We just wanted to
strip things back to the essentials." Hence the burlap.
Just after midnight, the scheduled start time for the party, the $ 2,000
customized quadraphonic sound system is silent. Outside, a few hundred kids
are getting antsy. The doors aren't open yet and Tim Price, Minus's event
manager, insists that they go back to their cars and wait. The police were
here at 9:30, hours before the event was to begin, responding to an
anonymous complaint (about what they wouldn't say). Someone from the Minus
crew - an American, at Hawtin's insistence - is down at the precinct sorting
out the problem. Things are tense.
Price's cell phone rings. The Detroit police have given them the go-ahead
and the crew scrambles to get things started. The tension is replaced by an
air of excitement. The gates open at 1:40 a.m., and security guards begin to
check IDs - you must be eighteen or over to enter - and search everyone for
drugs and other contraband. (A sign posted outside the gate reads, "No glo
sticks, alcohol, weapons or attidude [sic] . . . just dancing.") The drugs
long associated with the rave scene are barely in evidence: party-goers on
Ecstasy, the chemical that has defined the rave scene for a decade, are the
exception tonight, not the rule.
By 5 a.m., the room is a mass of swaying, sweaty bodies. Averaging 140 beats
per minute, twice as fast as the average heart rate, techno's pounding bass
and lack of a traditional song structure can, on first listen, seem a bit
like an assault. But the crowd at M1 wouldn't have it any other way. A man
in his late twenties, dancing a few feet away, suddenly stops, holds his
head in his hands, and screams as if he can't take it any more. Just as
abruptly he begins dancing again, only faster and harder this time, lifting
his head towards the ceiling, a beatific smile spreading across his face. A
woman who appears to be asleep on a couch by the entrance suddenly jumps up
and starts to dance, inspired by a new bass-line that Hawtin has mixed in.
The dance floor is a writhing stew of vaguely familiar repetitive movements:
a boy tugs on his baseball cap and hops back and forth in a sort of sped-up
jig; a girl waves her finger in the air, Charleston-style; and a whole bunch
of kids appear to be directing air traffic or sizing windows, their hands
cutting through the air with semaphoric precision.
By 7 a.m., the crowd begins to thin. A few exhausted party-goers rest
against the burlap-covered walls. Hundreds of cigarette butts and colourful
flyers litter the floor. Hawtin spins his last record around 7:30, and there
are still more than 100 people on the dance floor. The lights finally go up.
Everyone looks tired, their faces wan and blotchy and their eyes bleary;
nonetheless, as they exit the club, they seem satisfied. The Minus crew
jumps into action, motivated by the promise of breakfast in Detroit's
Eastern Market district. Giddy with success and sleep deprivation, Hawtin
and the crew members gossip about the party. Narrowly averted disasters are
recounted - the visit of the fire marshal at 2:30 a.m., pop spilled on a
turntable - and celebrity appearances are noted, including those of techno
pioneer Eddie "Flashin'" Fowlkes and, weirdly, Tommy Lee of Motley Crue.
They are a rather dishevelled group; covered in burlap hairs and dub filth,
they'll certainly stick out among the Saturday morning brunch crowd.
Hawtin has not slept in over twenty-four hours, nor will he until many hours
later. But rest is not a priority. His mind is already on his next project:
he needs to scout locations for the film crew he's hired to shoot the
demolition of Detroit's famous Hudson's Building, scheduled for that
afternoon. He won't go home until late tonight, after Hudson's is another
pile of downtown Detroit rubble. Then he'll cross the line again, back into
Canada, to the building that he bought a few years ago, across from the
Hiram Walker factory. He'll lie down to sleep at last, and if he dreams,
he'll probably dream of Detroit. "Even when I couldn't come to the U.S.," he
says, "I liked the view of Detroit from Windsor. I liked the idea of it."
GRAPHIC: Illustration; 1
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
IAC-CREATE-DATE: March 4, 1999
LOAD-DATE: March 05, 1999
By Margie Borschke
Richie Hawtin is driving his late-model silver BMW down familiar streets,
through the modest tree-lined neighbourhoods of Windsor, Ontario. As we turn
onto Huron Church Road, heading north, the maple trees give way to fast-food
joints, and we cruise towards the Detroit River, past the strip malls and
the Assumption CathoLic Church. Hawtin and I are on our way to the United
States, which around here isn't really that big a deal, for most people. The
border between Michigan and Ontario is a line that the residents of Windsor
cross often, to shop, to work, to go out for dinner. But for Richie Hawtin,
the border has proved more complicated.
Hawtin is a DJ, and a world-famous one. It's a job title that has gone
through as many evolutions and permutations as popular music itself: think
of Wolfman Jack spinning platters in "American Graffiti," then Shep
Pettibone keeping the disco beat alive at Studio 54, then Terminator X
scratching and mixing for Public Enemy. Hawtin, who performs around the
globe and can command thousands of dollars for a single night's work,
represents the latest incarnation of the DJ; as "Plastikman," he's become
one of the world's most successful practitioners of the musical style known
as techno, the fast-paced, funky electronic dance music that was born in
Detroit's decaying downtown and spawned a revolution in youth culture in
Britain and Europe - and to a lesser extent in North America - in the late
'80s and early '90s.
Right across the river, Detroit was like a second home to Hawtin when he was
growing up. Now, as we pull up to the tollbooth on the Canadian side of the
Ambassador Bridge, we can see across the water the towering Renaissance
Center, a gasp of architectural optimism that looms above the abandoned
streets of Detroit's inner city. Hawtin, twenty-eight, dressed in a T-shirt,
Carhart work pants, and his trademark Belgian-designed black plastic
glasses, pays the toll, and we roll onto the bridge towards America.
High above the icy chop of the Detroit River, Hawtin points eastward to an
elegant but crumbling neoclassical structure on the opposite shore. "That's
the old train station," he says. Abandoned by Amtrak in 1988, the station is
typical of the faded glory and tragic neglect for which Detroit is now
infamous. But Richie sees more there than just a faded past; he sees the
potential for a raucous, heartthumping present. This is the sort of deserted
building that is ideal for a really loud rave, the huge, all-night dance
parties that are the signature event of the techno world. "Someone tried to
have a party there once," he says, "but it got shut down before it even
began."
Hawtin arrived in Windsor with his parents in 1979, an immigrant from a
small town near Oxford, England. Coming to Canada, nine-year-old Richie had
expected more mountains and bears and less American-style industrialization.
"As soon as we came out of the airport in Windsor it was big cars, concrete,
and wires seemingly everywhere," he remembers."I didn't really see a
difference between Canadians and Americans then. It was all kind of one
thing in my head."
As a boy, Hawtin would lie on his bed in his parents' house in LaSalle, a
suburb just south of Windsor, and listen to cutting-edge music on Detroit
radio. Eclectic shows hosted by the Electrifyin' Mojo and the Wizard
featured proto-techno bands like Kraftwerk, European industrial bands like
Nitzer Ebb, as well as electro, funk, and early house music. It was music
that suggested a world unlike anything he had experienced, and Hawtin knew
he wanted in. His earliest stabs at DJing were at an underage club in
Windsor, and even as a teenager he was frequenting now-legendary Detroit
clubs like the Music Institute. Soon he was working both sides of the
border, and he quickly became a presence in Detroit's underground party
scene. By the time he was eighteen, he had a weekly DJ gig at the Shelter,
another dub in downtown Detroit. "If you want anything that is a bit out of
the ordinary or different around here, you've got to go to Detroit," Hawtin
explains.
It was also in Detroit that Hawtin met fellow Canadian John Acquaviva, a
London, Ontario-based DJ who is his sometime collaborator and long-time
business partner. Together they launched Plus 8, an independent record label
that, along with Hawtin's new label, Minus, owns Hawtin's catalogue - four
albums and twenty-five singles, many recorded under the names of various
alter egos, like F.U.S.E., Robotman, Up!, and Xenon. Hawtin and Acquaviva's
first release, in 1990, "States of Mind," sparked some controversy: printed
on the white label was simply the slogan "THE FUTURE SOUND OF DETROIT." Some
members of the Detroit techno community - which was then predominantly black
- resented a couple of white kids from Canada making such a bold assertion.
"To us, it was our future sound of Detroit," Hawtin explains. "[Detroit] was
where I DJ'd, where I drew my inspiration from, and where it really started
to happen for me. [We took] the sound of Detroit and mutated it into our own
form."
In his early years, it was illegal for Hawtin to DJ in the United States
because he lacked the required work visa. When he tried, at eighteen, to
sort things out, an immigration lawyer told him he didn't qualify. Anyone
could be a DJ, the lawyer said; wasn't it just a matter of playing one
record after another? If Hawtin played a party in Detroit, he added, he
would be taking away an American job.
For years after that, every time Hawtin crossed the border into the U.S., he
didn't mention that he was going to DJ or host a party on the other side. He
was always "visiting friends," "going to dinner," "catching a show." And he
always made it across with a smile and a wave. Then, on April 28, 1995, on
his way to New York City to perform live for 2,000 people at the base of the
Brooklyn Bridge, Hawtin was stopped at the border. Perhaps his shaved head
and car full of electronic equipment prompted suspicion. (After all, the
Oklahoma City bombing had happened just a week before.) Maybe the city's
anti-rave task force was onto him; or maybe the officer was just in a bad
mood that day. But during the ensuing search the U.S. border guards opened a
letter that Hawtin had forgotten to post, in which he noted the date he was
to appear at the rave in Brooklyn. Hawtin, of course, hadn't mentioned it to
the guards; he had told them he was going to see a friend.
U.S. immigration officers questioned Hawtin for over three hours. "It was
pretty nasty," Hawtin says. "This guy was like, 'Tell us the truth and maybe
we can work this out.' They threatened to throw me in a cell. So, the stupid
thing I did was, I told them the truth. I wrote it down in a statement and
as soon as I'd done that they were all smiles. They told me to go home, and
that I shouldn't ever expect to get back into the States again."
The ban was a huge blow to Hawtin. Detroit was more to him than a place to
have good parties. It was also his muse. The Plastikman records, Hawtin
says, were reflections on experiences he'd had in Detroit, and without
access to the city - its diversity, its underground life, its youth culture,
all thriving in a place that everyone else seemed to have written off -
Plastikman didn't exist. "It was a very strange time," he says. "Besides my
family, I didn't have that many people in my life from Windsor. Everyone I'd
been doing parties with was in Detroit. My girlfriend was there. My friends
were there. Everything. Access to all these different things, all my
inspirations - I was cut off from it all. My world got a lot smaller that
day."
The situation forced Hawtin to re-examine his artistic ideas and goals.
"Richie had some profound moments," says Acquaviva. "He got a lot wiser and
his perspective changed." So did his music. Before the incident Hawtin had
begun recording material for what was to be his final Plastikman album, but
afterward, he lost interest. "Being banned gave me time to look to other
things for inspiration," he says. His music became more spare and
contemplative; it was still electronic, but now was increasingly
experimental and less danceable. He began a series called "Concept 1,"
releasing a new single each month for all of 1996. The results were nothing
you'd hear on a dance floor. Then, in 1998, he released two more moody
albums: "Consumed," a composerly minimalist soundscape without a single
dance beat; and "Artifakt [BC]," a more pared-down continuation of his
earlier work. Both were heavily influenced by what Hawtin describes as his
"exile" from Detroit." Artifakt' is about the exile," he explains, "whereas
'Consumed' is a product of that exile. It wouldn't have happened without
[my] getting thrown out of the States."
The treatment Hawtin received at the hands of the American government and
the subsequent support he discovered in his hometown also aroused a
nationalistic pride in Hawtin that he was unaware he possessed. It's part of
the reason that, for the first time, a Plastikman record received a Canadian
release. (The others, though recorded in Canada, were available only as U.S.
imports.) "It was one of the worst experiences of my life," he says of the
ordeal. "I wouldn't want to go through it again. But it really made me who I
am today. Maybe without it, I would still just be doing parties and making
dance tracks. I wouldn't want that either."
In 1996, one and a half years and thousands of dollars in legal fees after
it began, Hawtin's exile came to an end. With four critically acclaimed
Plastikman albums under his belt and his face on the cover of just about all
of the world's major dance-music magazines, the U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service agreed that Hawtin was "an alien of extraordinary
ability," or a "non-immigrant, status O-1." He is now free to enter the U.S.
to visit his girlfriend, to hang out with friends, and even to work.
Today, as we approach the American side of the bridge, Hawtin adjusts his
glasses and surveys the possibilities. There are no lines painted on the
pavement at U.S. Customs. Cars and trucks cut erratically across the
would-be lanes, each driver choosing the queue that seems both most likely
to move and least likely to result in a strip search or the dismantling of
one's car. Hawtin veers a couple of lanes to the right. He's placed his bet.
The car ahead of us pulls away from the customs booth, and Hawtin, taking
his foot off the brake, pulls up to be questioned. He sticks his head out of
the window and hands his passport, which is British despite his twenty years
in Canada, to the inspection agent. The plan today is that I will tag along
with Hawtin while he goes about his business, visiting his sound engineers
to master some tracks, meeting with his event co-ordinator, and doing
various label-related chores - all perfectly legal, legitimate pursuits
under the terms of Hawtin's visa. Still, when the middle-aged officer looks
up from Hawtin's passport and asks, "Where are you going?" Hawtin's answer
has the ring of experience.
"To have lunch with a friend," he says.
The guard waves us through.
The big event in Richie's life this week, as is often the case, is a party.
This one is called "M1," and it's going to take place Friday night. As late
as Thursday, M1 remains shrouded in mystery. As we drive around Detroit and
Windsor throughout the week, doing errands - cutting records here, dropping
off files for the printer there - Hawtin hands out flyers, invitations that
list only a date, time, Web address, and phone number. Who, what, and where
are conspicuously absent. Hawtin's parties are famous, and the organizers
want to keep this one intimate. At his last big party he played host to
1,500 people; the space they've rented out for Friday will hold only 400.
Despite the secrecy, the party is already being talked about, albeit
cryptically, on e-mail lists and among local scenesters. Some kids will
drive hundreds of miles to attend; others will fly in from places as distant
as San Francisco and Las Vegas for the night. "Show up early," Hawtin tells
everybody he hands a flyer to, though in the rave world, "early" is a
relative concept: the party is scheduled to begin at midnight and go until 6
a.m.
At 10 a.m. on Friday, the venue is announced on the information line and Web
site of Minus, one of Hawtin's two record labels. M1 is to be held at Better
Days, an after-hours club on Woodward Avenue, Detroit's main drag. We show
up late that afternoon to prepare. Hawtin retires to the DJ booth, where he
fiddles with his equipment and begins downing a steady stream of caffeinated
drinks. His set-up is complicated, as it has to be: when the rave starts,
he'll not only be mixing back and forth between records - like a regular
club DJ - but also playing his own, unreleased electronic tracks that he's
had cut into single-edition vinyl records. Over these tracks, he'll mix in
rhythms that he's programmed into his Roland 909 drum machine, adding the
occasional sample or warping the sound with his effects boxes.
Better Days has certainly seen some. Next door to the Scorpio Book Center
and its twenty-five-cent peep shows, Better Days is little more than a
thirty-by-sixty-foot cinder-block box. Its only concession to decor is a
day-glo mural of the Manhattan skyline, painted, apparently, by someone
unfamiliar with the real thing - the Brooklyn Bridge appears to cross the
wrong river, into the wrong part of town. Party-goers, however, will be
spared this bit of creative geography. Hawtin's crew is busy along long
pieces of burlap to the walls and ceding. Every inch of the room will be
covered in the stuff. It's an organic twist on a Plastikman theme: Hawtin's
nom de spin was inspired by a party space he once covered entirely in black
plastic.
Hawtin describes the parties he hosts as a reaction against the excesses
that have come to characterize the American rave scene: the ubiquitous
drugs, the long lists of big-name DJs who play short sets, the silly clothes
(think giant pants), and the even more ridiculous accessories (pacifiers,
stuffed animals, surgeons' masks, glowing wands, and hats of cartoonish
dimensions) favoured by some teenage party-goers. "I saw so many fuckin'
flowery hats and Dr. Seuss shit when I toured with Prodigy and Moby in
1992," says Hawtin, "that I just wanted to be sick. In America it's always
'More! More! More!' Flashing colours. Hats. Glo-sticks. We just wanted to
strip things back to the essentials." Hence the burlap.
Just after midnight, the scheduled start time for the party, the $ 2,000
customized quadraphonic sound system is silent. Outside, a few hundred kids
are getting antsy. The doors aren't open yet and Tim Price, Minus's event
manager, insists that they go back to their cars and wait. The police were
here at 9:30, hours before the event was to begin, responding to an
anonymous complaint (about what they wouldn't say). Someone from the Minus
crew - an American, at Hawtin's insistence - is down at the precinct sorting
out the problem. Things are tense.
Price's cell phone rings. The Detroit police have given them the go-ahead
and the crew scrambles to get things started. The tension is replaced by an
air of excitement. The gates open at 1:40 a.m., and security guards begin to
check IDs - you must be eighteen or over to enter - and search everyone for
drugs and other contraband. (A sign posted outside the gate reads, "No glo
sticks, alcohol, weapons or attidude [sic] . . . just dancing.") The drugs
long associated with the rave scene are barely in evidence: party-goers on
Ecstasy, the chemical that has defined the rave scene for a decade, are the
exception tonight, not the rule.
By 5 a.m., the room is a mass of swaying, sweaty bodies. Averaging 140 beats
per minute, twice as fast as the average heart rate, techno's pounding bass
and lack of a traditional song structure can, on first listen, seem a bit
like an assault. But the crowd at M1 wouldn't have it any other way. A man
in his late twenties, dancing a few feet away, suddenly stops, holds his
head in his hands, and screams as if he can't take it any more. Just as
abruptly he begins dancing again, only faster and harder this time, lifting
his head towards the ceiling, a beatific smile spreading across his face. A
woman who appears to be asleep on a couch by the entrance suddenly jumps up
and starts to dance, inspired by a new bass-line that Hawtin has mixed in.
The dance floor is a writhing stew of vaguely familiar repetitive movements:
a boy tugs on his baseball cap and hops back and forth in a sort of sped-up
jig; a girl waves her finger in the air, Charleston-style; and a whole bunch
of kids appear to be directing air traffic or sizing windows, their hands
cutting through the air with semaphoric precision.
By 7 a.m., the crowd begins to thin. A few exhausted party-goers rest
against the burlap-covered walls. Hundreds of cigarette butts and colourful
flyers litter the floor. Hawtin spins his last record around 7:30, and there
are still more than 100 people on the dance floor. The lights finally go up.
Everyone looks tired, their faces wan and blotchy and their eyes bleary;
nonetheless, as they exit the club, they seem satisfied. The Minus crew
jumps into action, motivated by the promise of breakfast in Detroit's
Eastern Market district. Giddy with success and sleep deprivation, Hawtin
and the crew members gossip about the party. Narrowly averted disasters are
recounted - the visit of the fire marshal at 2:30 a.m., pop spilled on a
turntable - and celebrity appearances are noted, including those of techno
pioneer Eddie "Flashin'" Fowlkes and, weirdly, Tommy Lee of Motley Crue.
They are a rather dishevelled group; covered in burlap hairs and dub filth,
they'll certainly stick out among the Saturday morning brunch crowd.
Hawtin has not slept in over twenty-four hours, nor will he until many hours
later. But rest is not a priority. His mind is already on his next project:
he needs to scout locations for the film crew he's hired to shoot the
demolition of Detroit's famous Hudson's Building, scheduled for that
afternoon. He won't go home until late tonight, after Hudson's is another
pile of downtown Detroit rubble. Then he'll cross the line again, back into
Canada, to the building that he bought a few years ago, across from the
Hiram Walker factory. He'll lie down to sleep at last, and if he dreams,
he'll probably dream of Detroit. "Even when I couldn't come to the U.S.," he
says, "I liked the view of Detroit from Windsor. I liked the idea of it."
GRAPHIC: Illustration; 1
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
IAC-CREATE-DATE: March 4, 1999
LOAD-DATE: March 05, 1999
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