Practice For The Rest of the Year: XOXO 2016

At the risk of losing most of my readers for this secular kids' music site, let me kick off this essay about a conference about the intersection of the internet and creativity with a story about church.

(That's me, #offbrand since 2002.)

The church I occasionally attend devotes a not insignificant portion of its Sunday service to having attendees offer up their celebrations and concerns to the congregation.  As a relative newcomer to the long-established congregation, I find a lot of it not all that relevant to me -- I don't really know you, let alone your son whose wife just had your fourth grandchild -- but one day a member of the staff put that part of the service into perspective.  She said, "we are open and welcoming in here on Sunday as practice for being open and welcoming in the world the rest of the week."

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I thought about that idea of practicing how you want to be or act a lot during my trip up to Portland, Oregon a couple weeks ago for the 2016 edition of the XOXO Festival.  The festival is an "experimental festival, shared workspace, and online community for independent artists and creators working online."  I attended a couple years ago, and when organizers Andy Baio and Andy McMillan said that the fifth iteration of XOXO could be the last (and that there would definitely be no XOXO in 2017), I threw my name into the attendance lottery.  I am no Darius Kazemi, but my name popped up in the lottery regardless, and so I found myself once more attending a festival not entirely sure whether I belonged.

As I was doing two years ago -- and will likely be doing in the future should XOXO ever return in some iteration -- I work a day job that is neither technology- nor artistically-based with steady middle-class pay.  My only real relationship to the art-and-technology aims of XOXO is this website and its affiliated work and working with people who are trying to figure out how to make more and better podcasts for kids.

Lucy Bellwood at XOXO 2016 - "The Internet will not give you what you want."

One of the (perhaps unplanned) benefits of XOXO is that it is a conference that attracts people like me, people who don't entirely fit in.  As I mentioned more than once in conversations that weekend, if XOXO were a typical "industry" conference (be that tech, the arts, or any field-specific conference), there would be a clear pecking order, with "stars" on one side (probably hidden away in a green room, flown in just for their specific talk) and the rest of the attendees on the other.  But because of the cross-domain nature of XOXO, it was entirely possible to have conversations with people and have all the parties think of everyone else, "Wow, they're doing something really cool."  It also meant that there would be cases where people famous in a particular field would be anonymous in some settings.  It leveled the playing field a bit and made it a little easier to be open and welcoming.

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Dinner! (A double scoop from Ruby Jewel Ice Cream)

Before some thoughts about life and one's relationship to the world around them, I should briefly mention ice cream.  I have thought deeply about ice cream and my relationship to it and I am unreservedly pro-ice cream.  (Waves hello to Salt & Straw, Fifty Licks, and -- shown here -- Ruby Jewel.)  I have been privileged enough to attend conferences held in hotels and while I find that the food at such conferences has generally been better than their reputation might suggest, I preferred the setup at XOXO, in which a curated list of some of the best of Portland's food carts were stationed right outside the conference for attendees to pick and choose.  Yes, we paid for those foods, but the variety (and probably the quality) was better.  Also, there was ice cream.  And donuts.

Putting the final piece on our Beasts of Balance sculpture

There were more than enough ways to keep the brain engaged after the stomach was full.  As in previous years, XOXO ran a festival at night which included tabletop games, an arcade, storytelling events, and film and animation screenings.  Those events ran concurrently on the two nights, so it would have been impossible to see and do everything, but some of the highlights for me were hearing a live (and brand-new) episode of Mike Rugnetta's Reasonably Sound, a brand-new episode of Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou's Every Frame a Painting series, successfully balancing all the beasts in the Jenga-in-reverse-for-the-digital-age game Beasts of Balance, and playing Illimat, a card game designed by Keith Baker and the Decemberists, with some of the Decembrists.  Also, on Sunday night we got to dance to Dan Deacon, which I can't recommend highly enough, having done it myself a few times.

I mention these fun and games not to make you jealous if you weren't able to attend but as a reminder to myself about the importance of, well, fun and games.  It is no less important to find time to enjoy the experiences that give you pleasure than it is to find time to work on things that give you meaning.  (Self, remember that.)

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The heart of the festival is still the conference itself, which features 16 speakers who have made a living in some way from using the internet.  One way in which the Andys I think model the "practice" behavior is in the composition of the speaker track.  Two years ago, 6 of the 16 speakers identified as women (and 10, or 11 really, as men); this year, that order was reversed, with women holding 11 of the 16 speaking slots.  If you are committed to seeing a tech world in which women aren't given a second-class position, then you have to commit to changing the corner of the world which you control, and that's something which is worth noting and commending.  (That's only a small portion of how the Andys have listened and improved -- see: child care, non-alcoholic beverages at events, I could go on and on.)

I found almost all of the talks to be compelling and with something to noodle on during and after the talk -- they will be released online and I encourage you to check them out when they're available -- but at the risk of giving short (OK, no) shrift to some compelling speakers, I want to touch on just three.

Slide ("The Internet Will Not Give You What You Want") from Lucy Bellwood's 2016 XOXO talk

The first was the concluding talk on Saturday from Portland comic artist and illustrator Lucy Bellwood.  What I remembered most from her talk is probably unfair to her -- it's her admission that she only got off of Food Stamps this year.  That admission was part of a larger talk about the difficulty of knowing how to value oneself, from the perspective of an artist.  How do you do the thing you love, and how do you put a price on it?  She didn't offer any specific answers (other than perhaps a wish that people would put a higher price on creative output), but what resonated with me, besides the honesty in admitting financial difficulties, was the centering of the question of what it means to have a good life and the tension between living your intentions and simply making ends meet when creativity is a big part of your life.  It's not that Bellwood's approach is the right or the wrong approach, but it's certainly the right question.

If Bellwood was forthcoming in admitting her financial balancing act, writer/illustrator/artisanal pencil sharpener David Rees took financial transparency one step further Sunday morning, as he outlined his income by year for more than a decade.  Rees has had a series of successes, including hosting his own TV show, Going Deep with David Rees.  Despite all that, in his presentation Rees claimed never to have earned more than $100,000 in a single year.  From one perspective, he appeared to be doing better than Bellwood, but in many ways his talk was just as dispiriting as Bellwood's -- if someone can host their own TV show and still not make more than an average engineer -- then it really does seem like there's a tension between creative output and financial security that will be hard to resolve.

And that's where the final speaker on Sunday, designer Frank Chimero, suggested a frame of reference that doesn't magically unlock financial riches for talented artists like Bellwood, Rees, or the other creators that graced the stage at the conference and festival, but does offer a different view.  Chimero referenced an interview with Krista Tippett, in which she notes the complications from conflating "vocation" with "job":

I’m very committed and fond of the language of vocation, which I think became narrowly tied to our job titles in the 20th Century. Our vocations or callings as human beings may be located in our job descriptions, but they may also be located in how we are present to whatever it is we do. It may be that your job at any given point is to make the income to feed your family. That is noble, too.

That's a little bit more than what Chimero referenced in his slide, but I think it further drives home the point Chimero made in his talk.  Creators need to work together to figure out how to help each other thrive.  That's been an animating principle behind XOXO, and will continue even if there's never another XOXO-related physical gathering.

But creators can also consider what they do creatively outside the context of how much they earn for their creative work.  That's not an argument for giving away their creative work for free -- in fact, I'd argue it's exactly the opposite.  It's recognizing that creative work has value in and of itself, before any assignment of market value.  Viewed in that way, the creative work can have significant value to the creator.  The question then becomes, how do I create a life which allows me the time and energy to create, viewing the act of creation as a vocation I'm committed to, rather than a job I need to extract value out of.

I totally recognize the privileged position I'm making this argument from, and that my status as a middle-class person with health insurance (not to mention all my other privileges as a straight white male) whose creative output is an occasional side project could make this a facile argument.  But I really believe that approaching the creative process as a calling rather than specifically a job might help some artists think what it is that feeds their soul, and how they can fit that into a life that feeds their bodies as well.

Andy McMillan and Andy Baio banter at the end of XOXO 2016

I was interviewing a couple kids musicians this week -- OK, it was Andrew and Polly -- and they mentioned that putting together one 20-minute episode of their fabulous Ear Snacks podcast takes 65 hours or more of effort.  That's a crazy-expensive episode if you judge it by the cost of their time when they write music for films or TV shows.  But the duo has, for now, decided not to try to charge money for it, feeling like doing something like putting ads on it or changing it in order to attract some sort of sponsor, would diminish its value.  They've made a decision that it has more value to them unpriced and unaltered from their vision.  It's a choice they can make from a privileged position, and their approach might mean they may never make more Ear Snacks after this season (because, c'mon, 65 HOURS AN EPISODE?!), but they've committed to living out their calling, at least for the moment.

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So thanks, Andy and Andy, for the opportunity to attend a festival which helps people think about how the internet is changing our creative lives, and what that means to our entire lives.  I suspect you would both view the analogy to church a little distasteful, but to the extent that you're helping a lot of people think about how they can relate to individuals and society as a whole, and their place within society, I think XOXO has done a lot of what church at its secular best can do.  Creative life on the internet is often still a scary and unpredictable place, but I think you've helped carve out a community that will continue to seek a path forward to make it less scary and more predictable for everyone.

Stories, Memes, and Fans: A Review of NerdCon: Stories 2015

I'll begin with a story.

Last year, in September 2014, I went to Portland, Oregon for XOXO, a conference and festival designed for people who make a living with the internet, either because they make the internet go in some way, or they use the tools and social structures the internet enables.  Silicon Valley folks, musicians, and... me.  (It was a lot more diverse than that sentence implies, but it's safe to say I was more the exception than the rule.)

It was only after I got to Portland and started focusing on the speaker's list for the conference portion that I realized that the speaker Hank Green was the Hank Green, that guy who's one-half of the Vlogbrothers, a founder of VidCon, and -- this is the important part -- somebody who my daughter, Miss Mary Mack, by now a teenager, is a huuuuuuuge fan of.  (She is an avid Nerdfighter, as some of Vlogbrothers' fans call themselves.)  In other words, if it had been my daughter there in Portland, and not me, the entire conference would have been leading up to Green's talk instead of his talk being an "oh!" moment, as it was for me.  (His talk, by the way, is really good.  I recommend it.)

Having said that, my daughter took the news that I saw Hank Green in stride.  Had I met Green in person, as Nick Disabato did, it's possible that her reaction would have been more along the lines of the author's teenaged nephew, who, after hearing that Disabato had casually chatted with Green in the food truck lines for a half hour, yelled at him in anger, "Hank Green was wasted on you!"

All of that -- hearing Green speak, my daughter's Nerdfighteria, the fact that I get myself to conferences I'm not entirely sure I'm the target market for -- helps to explain why I found myself in a large convention center ballroom in Minneapolis a couple weeks watching a squid answer questions.

Rapid-fire question and answer with famous people and a squid at NerdCon: Stories

We were in Minneapolis for NerdCon: Stories, the first NerdCon from Green and the folks who put on VidCon in Anaheim every year.  VidCon is a huge affair, bringing nearly 20,000 fans to a convention center across the street from Disneyland to meet and maybe learn from the biggest names in online video, names that I, for the most part, would not recognize at all, but would be stunned to find out would have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fans on YouTube, Vine, Snapchat, etc. etc.

In related news: I'm old.

But in late March, John Moe of the great radio program and podcast Wits noted that he was going to be participating in this thing called NerdCon: Stories, a conference which billed itself as a celebration of story-telling featuring authors, podcasters, musicians, and others.  The conference was being run by Hank Green's VidCon folks.  The conference would be held in Minneapolis, where I have many friends.  In other words, not only did this sound interesting, it also sounded like it had a much better chance than most first-year conferences of being well-attended, and even if it wasn't, we could visit friends.  It was actually doable... so we went ahead and did it.

I guess I should explain the squid.  The squid was -- and I hope I'm not revealing any secrets here -- a guy in a giant squid costume.  To be more specific, The Giant Squidstravaganza is the brainchild of Paul and Joe DeGeorge, who are also the folks behind Harry and the Potters (more on them anon).  The squid has a podcast -- the Cephalopodcast, of course -- and why wouldn't he be answering rapid-fire questions about himself with the likes of Rainbow Rowell, the aforementioned John Moe, Mara Wilson, and Joseph Fink (Welcome to Night Vale)?  It could have gone over very poorly, but it (both the squid in particular and the panel in general) was, like much of the conference, very, very funny.

In looking back at the conference agenda, I realize just how dry it all sounds, how... conference-like.  Panels, mainstage things, breaks for meals.  "We will learn about the importance of stories and how to produce stories, and the technical components of making a living sharing stories..." [/boring teacher voice].  But in execution, the weekend was was way more of a festival or what a "con" might entail.  Of course, I've never attended a "con" before.

In related news: not only am I old, I don't play RPG games, rarely read fantasy or sci-fi, don't watch much TV, and am generally, it would appear after reading this, a stick-in-the-mud.

But do I enjoy watching authors and podcasters get into arguments that devolve into (exaggerated fisticuffs) over whether someone would rather fight against 100 duck-sized horses or one giant horse-sized duck.  Thank you, John Scalzi and Kevin B. Free (again, from Welcome to Night Vale among other things) for taking the absurdity of that particular debate to its logical conclusion -- headlocks.

A spirited debate at NerdCon: Stories 2015

NerdCon: Stories was probably the funniest conference I've ever been to, and that includes not only the occasional day-job conferences (very dry) but also XOXO, Kindiefest, and even MaxFunCon, which is from a podcast network that features comedians.  I laughed a lot.  Not only that, the absurd nature of some of the discussions led to some amusing in-conference viral memes, like how an answer in a mainstage game of Superfight about the Illuminati, but made of guacamole, led to the creation of The Guacanati (and, of course, the accompanying Twitter account) and its own hand sign (two hands forming a triangular tortilla chip shape). 

I also thought quite a bit about stories and narratives and who tells those narratives and the importance of hearing those narratives from a wide range of perspectives.  Some of the panels were more focused than others, but I viewed the process of picking what panel to see when multiple panels were taking place akin to that of picking classes in college -- pick the professor (i.e., panelist) you want to hear, not the class title you think you want.  So while the topic of the challenges of adapting a work into another medium didn't interest me at all, the fact that John Green (Hank's brother, an author, perhaps you've heard of him?) was speaking on that panel very much did.

But as someone for whom "fandom" is not a particularly pleasant state of being, I felt somewhat at a remove from the guests.  I sympathized with author Patrick Rothfuss, who recounted a story of politely declining to take a selfie with a fan led to a somewhat dismissive public response on Twitter, without the fan knowing that Rothfuss was in the middle of trying to make funeral plans for a recently and suddenly deceased friend of his.  Believe me, as a Kindiefest guest, I get where Rothfuss was coming from -- even on the waaaaaay smaller scale of Kindiefest, I would get exhausted from talking to folks who wanted to talk to me about Kids Music Stuff when I would have been happier just talking about random things like the weather or the awesomeness of the taco truck down the street.  I can only imagine how taxing that must feel for Rothfuss let alone John Green, who didn't do a signing session.

Miss Mary Mack was all about trying to meet Hank Green (his two signing sessions filled up incredibly quickly in advance and she wasn't able to do so), while I sat to get books autographed by John Scalzi (for our hosts) and John Moe (because I really like his stuff), and aside from 10 seconds of chit-chat, that was all I needed.  But both of them are funny people -- I feel like if I spent time interacting with them that wasn't creator-fan but two middle-aged guys talking about something random, that would be more my speed.  It was those opportunities that I wished there'd been more of, because I'm used to those opportunities at the smaller conferences like those I mentioned above.  With well more than 2,000 fans in attendance at NerdCon, that probably wasn't going to happen.

So it was the youngster -- i.e., Miss Mary Mack -- who found herself in the middle of a circle of fans around Harry and the Potters as they finished up a party for the Harry Potter Alliance, singing the band's lovely singalong "The Weapon."  She was the one getting Nerdfighter pins, meeting fellow fans, getting us to go to a Nerdfighter meetup Sunday afternoon after the conference had ended.  I had a lovely time, but I hope for her it meant even more.

OK, some final comments in case there are any NerdCon folks (producers, attendees) who've read this far:

1) I wish there were more structured opportunities for attendees to interact with each other (and, to the extent possible, with the guests as well).  I kept watching the guests have fun interacting on stage and wishing there were similar opportunities for the attendees.  Now those interaction opportunities could be as simple as a game room, or an ongoing open-mike or storytelling session (they had those, but they were limited in time, and because the open-mike session was on the mainstage, it may have scared off some folks who might not have wanted to share their talents in front of hundreds of people).  But I think one of the great things about MaxFunCon is that there's little distinction between guests and attendees.  Obviously its size (less than 200) makes that possible.  XOXO is larger (close to 1,000) but by having a smaller conference and including a festival component that includes gaming and music, it provides more of those attendee interaction opportunities.  I'm not suggesting that there be a ton of public-facing performances for attendees.  I'm struck in reading Fangirl, a YA novel I picked up at NerdCon, written by guest Rainbow Rowell, how the impulse in writing fanfic (another thing I've never had any interest) can be primarily that of community, not of performance (let alone fame).

2) I wish there had been a closing session.  The last session Saturday night was a performance of "Too Might Light Makes the Baby Go Blind" performed by the Neo-Futurists (i.e., the folks behind Welcome to Night Vale), which was really enjoyable, but it was odd that a conference dedicated to the story didn't provide one of the most important things almost all good stories provide: closure.

3) I also had a small sense of confusion over what the conference was trying to be -- a conference, a "con," or a festival -- but its good humor and diverse guest list overcame that confusion.  Maybe rather than giving it a "Stories" focus, they could have called it NerdCon: Hank, or "HankCon," or "HankAndPatrickCon" (because Patrick Rothfuss was a major contributor in the planning of the weekend).  XOXO has always essentially been a weekend of the two Andys who are its founders indulging their own tech and culture whims, and it always seems to work out.  Hopefully they'll figure out what worked and tweak next year's event accordingly.

4) Mary Robinette Kowal should teach courses on how to run a good conference panel.  Her method -- take questions first, before the panel starts -- should be, well, mandatory for any conference that isn't taking questions solely via Twitter.  (OK, I hate to mandate anything.  But I loved that approach.)

If you're interested in other perspectives on the conference, I recommend John Scalzi's and Hank Green's comments.  Having said all this, I haven't said all I want to say, but it's time to wrap this up and press "publish" on this post.  I'd like to think that Hank Green wasn't wasted on me this time around.  I (and Miss Mary Mack) had a blast and look forward attending another NerdCon (Stories or otherwise) in the future.

It's Not About the Water Bottle: 2014 XOXO Conference

I was making my way to my seat near the back of the plane, when I had this flash of recognition followed shortly by a sinking feeling:

I'd lost my water bottle.

AAAAAHHHHH!  I ever-so-briefly wondered: could I -- should I -- get off the plane to retrieve it?  Wander through the waiting area in the Portland airport?  And then I realized going back to get a water bottle was all kinds of wrong and I'd never see that lovely water bottle ever again.

What sort of water bottle, you might ask, would put thoughts of exiting a plane into my mind?  They still serve water and drinks on planes (for now).  Why the angst?

Well, it was a sweet little stainless steel water bottle featuring a logo from the conference and festival I'd just attended, XOXO. And besides how forgetting it made me feel like a dork -- what am I, an absent-minded preschooler? -- it was a tangible reminder of the very real community I'd just spent 3 days joining.  Who wants to lose a feeling of belonging?

The Redd, a former factory converted into temporary tech conference hotel ballroom in Portland.

I'll choose to blame the Andys, I guess.  That would be Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, the founders and organizers of the festival.  It seems unfair, I know, to blame the people responsible for creating and giving me the water bottle for my loss of it, but it makes sense in some perverse way, right?  If they hadn't created this festival and all the experiences within it, then I wouldn't be sad about losing this totem that could have been a daily reminder of those experiences.

The conference -- this year's edition was its third iteration -- is described as "an experimental festival celebrating independently-produced art and technology."  What does that mean, though?

If you wanted to describe the conference as a tech conference, you could do so without drawing any snickers.  There were many people from technology firms large and small in attendance. I talked to programmers (lots of programmers), data visualizers, designers.  I'm sure that if I were part of that community in my daily life I could have -- and would have -- had more conversations that discussed APIs, whatever those are.

(I kid. I know what APIs are. Sort of.)

But I am not part of that community.  My dad was many years ago -- maybe if I'd told my story about attending SIGGRAPH as a teenager with him more than 25 years ago I'd could've earned some IT cred -- but me? No.  I have a middle-class job I enjoy very much but that is emphatically not in the art and/or technology fields.  I was at XOXO because I:

a) won a lottery (well, multiple lotteries, more on that later),

b) write and talk about kids music for fun and, occasionally, (comparatively little) money, and

c) knew enough about the Andys and their previous conferences.

I thought it'd be a fun time and that I might learn something.

So for me, XOXO was not a tech conference. It wasn't even a creatives conference.

It was, above all, a conference modeling possible ways to negotiate life.

My game of Marrying Mr. Darcy -- so, so fun.

We joke in my day job that if you learn something new -- on your own, not from someone else in the office -- you get to take the rest of the day off.  Doesn't matter how job-related the fact is or isn't -- in fact, the less related to the job, the better the joke when somebody tells us some incredible fact they just learned and then says, "OK, I'm outta here, see you tomorrow."  Although we joke about it (no, we don't actually leave the office), there's something serious underlying that conceit.  It's the idea that curiosity is a valuable trait, sometimes for its usefulness to the job at hand and sometimes for its (current) uselessness to the job at hand.

I suspect many XOXO attendees would subscribe to that notion.  I met puppeteers, house concert organizers, people who develop apps and websites or played in bands on the side.  I met very few people with narrow interests.  Collectively and individually, there was a pronounced tendency towards interest in, if not outright enthusiasm for, new things.  In this regard, I was amongst my people.  I met lots of people, too -- it was a very outgoing crowd, or at least one in which wandering up to a conversation in progress or talking with someone waiting for lunch from the food carts parked outside the conference building was expected.

I'm a believer that conferences are remembered not by the ostensible purpose of the conference -- the talks, the workshops -- but rather the entertainment and conversations surrounding the conference.  XOXO scored very highly in that regard, attracting a group of interested (and interesting) people and then giving them spaces in which to interact when the talks were over.  I was most acutely drawn to those events which allowed the highest degree of interaction -- Music (singing along and dancing with others is fun!) and especially the Tabletop event.  I highly recommend Marrying Mr. Darcy, which I purchased on the spot after playing, and can also recommend the forthcoming Monikers.  I danced and sang along to Pomplamoose with fellow XOXO attendee Lori Henriques one night, and John Roderick and Sean Nelson the next (Roderick playing a gig with a broken finger on his strumming hand for goodness' sakes).  I played video games -- I almost never play video games.

Hey, it's Pomplamoose!  (Live at Holocene, Friday night)  Do not miss them, people!

I watched as the XOXO CEOs -- that is, Chief Enthusiasm Officers -- Andy and Andy sang and danced along with the rest of us.  Yes, they had to deal with the major and minor annoyances involved in putting together such a large undertaking, but they also had figured out a way to structure their life for the weekend such that they could also take time to sing along, to indulge their joy in the carnival they'd brought to life.

Hank Green is a funny, funny man.  Right!

Most of the talks during the daytime conference were good, with my attention only drifting through a couple of them.  They will eventually be posted online, and I encourage you to check them out, particularly those from Erin McKean, Hank Green, Joseph Fink, Rachel Binx, Darius Kazemi, and Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin.

The talks themselves (16 in all) blur together a bit -- but you can search the #xoxofest tag on Twitter and find lots of pithy quotations from the presentation, half of them probably from Wordnik (now Reverb) founder Erin McKean.  She talked about creativity, coining the phrase "an enthusiasm of Andys," and about how being creative in a separate field with no stakes (in her case, her affinity for sewing clothes for herself) offers her freedom.

She also talked about difficult times, how "The only way out is through."  This is a slight reworking of Robert Frost's famous line from his 1914 poem "A Servant to Servants" -- "The best way out is always through," but the meaning is the same -- you can't escape difficult times, you just have to work through them.

I would offer a corollary piece of advice appropriate for XOXO that the only way in is, well, in.  To start.  That's probably an easy statement to make in the midst of hundreds of people who start and make stuff, but harder to hold onto a month later when you're at home with far fewer of those people around you.  We are all interdependent, as several speakers reminded us, and so gratefulness is always a good approach, but those interdependencies and webs of support can be hidden too.

Hank Green of Vlogbrothers fame gave a talk notable for its movement (was he pacing? It sure felt like he was pacing) and for not taking much credit for his success.  He essentially found it random (as did Joseph Fink, co-creator of the out-of-nowhere podcast-now-live-show phenomenom Welcome to Night Vale).  And if success at some level is essentially random, then you need to think repeatedly about why you're doing something so you can adjust course if necessary. "Better to think about why you want something than what you want," Green said, and depending on the path your life takes, "you might not want what you thought you wanted."  In other words (mine, to be clear): do something for how it makes you feel or because it's the right thing to do, not for the end result. Because you can't guarantee that end result.

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I think that's Oregon peaches with toasted walnuts on top, some sort of chocolate with a hint of sea salt on the bottom.

I'm a straight, white male, reasonably fit and healthy, and with a middle to perhaps upper-middle class upbringing here in the United States.  That means I've already been luckier than 95% -- 98%? -- of anyone who's ever lived in terms of the ease of my life.

It is the equivalent of having someone hand you two scoops of ice cream served in a waffle cone from Salt & Straw for no reason whatsoever. (I took one of my dinner breaks to walk there from the conference and eat ice cream. For dinner. It was worth it.)

It is the equivalent of winning the lottery.  Maybe not the million-dollar jackpot -- though I suspect that over a lifetime those personal characteristics may very well have given me a million dollars worth of advantages -- but certainly a big deal.

And being at XOXO was like winning the lottery again.  I literally won a lottery to attend -- that was how the Andys chose to divy out most of their passes to the event to people who applied online, and my name was randomly selected.  It wasn't cheap, either -- $500 for the conference and festival pass, plus travel expenses.  That middle-class day job I have?  That allows me, with diligent budgeting, to sometimes do something like this.

So I spent a lot of time listening and thinking about privilege.  For me, some of the most useful presentations and conversations of the weekend were the ones like that from Rachel Binx, who has founded a couple different companies, but who was brutally honest in recounting the times when running those business has been difficult financially.  I talked with art dealer Jen Bekman about a presentation she found frustrating in a way I might not otherwise have understood.  I got to see one of the iOS apps that the App Camp For Girls developed this past summer and talk about the need for more such environments with founder Jean MacDonald.  I'd like to think I understood those concepts intellectually in my younger dats, but as a parent of a STEAM-obsessed Miss Mary Mack who's now thinking about high schools and math and programming, it's become more real for me.  (All this, plus a talk about misogyny in gaming by Anita Sarkeesian, whose presentation was far more calm and rational than I would be if I'd had death threats lodged against me and my mere presence to give a talk required the presence of a bodyguard.)

The most subversive talk of the conference was from Darius Kazemi. I don't want to ruin his talk too much, but suffice it to say it was funny and served as a commentary on many talks at tech conferences and, to be honest, lots of conferences generally.  Kazemi points out that a lot of people's success is based on luck -- he pinned the percentage of stuff that succeeds with the public at maybe 10%.  This is similar to what musician Jonathan Mann said in a separate talk, and also echoed the comments of Hank Green and Joseph Fink.  Both success and failure can be inexplicable.

Not that successful people don't work hard -- many of them do. Heck, I've won those lotteries I've mentioned above, and I still work hard. But to interpret your own success as based solely on work is to deny the power of randomness. Lots of people work hard and never achieve stunning success. Better, then, to focus on the process than the result and try as many things as you have time to.  (David Lowery would agree.)

My XOXO was one of a billion possible XOXOs I could have had.  Most of them would probably have been equally strange and wonderful.  A handful might have unalterably changed my life (presumably for the good, but one never knows).  But it's the XOXO I did have, and I'm grateful for it.  (Thanks, Andy and Andy.  You guys rock.)  Being humble in the face of good fortune you know you're at best only partially responsible for is a good approach for life generally.

---

I won once more at XOXO, which I can barely believe.  (Actually, I won at least once more beyond that, earning a free game for a score on a Shrek pinball game at a party Friday afternoon, something that I don't think I'd ever earned on any arcade game, pinball or electronic, but never mind that.)

I was one of six people picked to receive a NeoLucida, a small "camera lucida" drawing tool which refracts light so that the viewer can essentially trace an object sitting in front of him or her.  The two men, Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin, who co-founded the company also gave a presentation, and their talk was notable for their pointing out that even in this high-tech society, the manufacture of things still requires people.  The NeoLucida is put together by hand in China by people making far less per day than I make (see again, lottery).

I wanted the NeoLucida because I've never been comfortable with my drawing skills.  That's another way of saying I'm really bad at it.  But by serving as a drawing aid, the NeoLucida offers the opportunity to practice, while producing something that looks, sort of, like real life.  (In particular, I'm looking forward to drawing members of my family.)  I don't need for it to be perfect, I don't even need it to be good.  I just want another way to express creativity, another process to learn, another way in.

In the end, that's what I'm choosing to take from XOXO instead of the water bottle.  The water bottle is a physical reminder of something I did. The NeoLucida and the attitude of XOXO's attendees are reminders of something I'm doing now and what I should do in the future. As long as I walk through life with curiosity, humility, gratefulness, and awareness of others, I can be proud of the life I'm living.

MaxFunCon 2014: Enthusiastic About Enthusiasm

There was a point, while I was dancing along to Dan Deacon in an Oxford shirt and tie, that I thought, "I have never seen so many people taking 'Bohemian Rhapsody' quite so seriously and joyfully."

Also, "I'm surprised I'm still wearing this tie."

***

I'm not entirely sure what drew me to MaxFunCon 2014.  It was a question I asked myself several times before going, and, failing to find an answer that made sense to me, or to my family, I asked fellow attendees.

Their response was mostly: the podcasts.  And not just the podcasts generally.  Most of the attendees had specific favorites that they listened to regularly -- Stop Podcasting Yourself, for example, or Jordan, Jesse Go!

They were enthusiasts.

As am I -- I've been writing a website about an often-marginalized and still niche music genre for nearly a decade -- but they were at a conference that actually included things they were enthusiastic about.

Me, I'm just enthusiastic generally.  So if there was anything I had in common with the other attendees, it was this: we were enthusiastic about enthusiasm.

***

At this point, I think I should backtrack a bit and explain what MaxFunCon actually is.  The Maximum Fun (the "MaxFun" part) network is a collection of shows primarily distributed as podcasts, though what I consider to be the flagship show, the pop culture interview and review show "Bullseye," is also distributed on NPR stations.

(Perhaps my characterization of that show as the network's flagship, however, is shaded by my own biases, as "Bullseye" is one of just two shows I listen to on a regular basis, and as much as I enjoy podcasts, I still tend to defer to shows that air on actual radio as being more "important," even though for all I know "Bullseye" doesn't get as many listeners as some of the podcast-only shows.  Also, NPR pays me to review stuff.  In any case, I got the impression that I was in the minority of attendees for whom "Bullseye" was at the top of their MaxFun list.)

"Bullseye" is hosted by, and the MaxFun network run by, Jesse Thorn, who in addition to hosting radio shows and running podcast networks also runs a men's fashion website, Put This On.  (Not to mention the Atlantic Ocean Comedy and Music Festival, a cruise which grew out of a one-time MaxFunCon East.)  As you can tell, the man, too, is an enthusiast and he has diverse interests that mix in often harmonious ways.  ("All Things Scottish… and Pizza," this is not.)

Several years ago, Thorn thought it would be interesting (or maybe just make a little money for his non-profit network) to put on a convention -- a "Con" -- that drew together Thorn's podcasters and talented friends and his fans and listeners. Or, as it's described now, a "gathering of creative people who wish to be more awesome."

"MaxFun" + "Con" = "MaxFunCon"

So for several years, Thorn and his Maximum Fun colleagues have hosted MaxFunCon at UCLA Lake Arrowhead Conference Center, a gorgeous facility along Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino mountains northeast of Los Angeles.

I heard the phrases "Shangri-La" and "Brigadoon" thrown around to describe MaxFunCon.  They're not inappropriate.

***

OK, but what did you actually do?

I got there shortly before 6 pm on Friday evening after driving from Phoenix (5 1/2 hours door-to-door).  Needing to check in and unpack in the condolet (a fancy word for chalet-style hotel room), I missed the welcome happy hour, but slid into a back-row seat amidst the 200 or so attendees in a conference room-as-mountain chalet as we were formally introduced to MaxFunCon by Jesse Thorn.  He outlined the basic ground rules, which I'd summarize as be welcoming, seek consent (kids, ask your parents), and don't be too weird to the teachers/comedians.  With that, John Hodgman (host of the other MaxFun podcast I regularly listen to, Judge John Hodgman) came out and welcomed us all by providing a flask of artisanal bad spirits (following up on a bit he did last year) and singing one of his favorite songs, Cynthia Hopkins' "Surrounded by Friendship," which he has done repeatedly at MaxFunCons and other shows of his.

[Note: this is the only explicitly kindie-related link of the conference.  Long-time kids music listeners will recognize Hopkins' name and that song as Dan Zanes and Hopkins performed it on his House Party album.  (Hear Hodgman, Hopkins, and Jonathan Coulton perform it live back in 2011 here.)  </kids music nerdery>]

And at some point -- I can't remember if it was before or after Hodgman played "Surrounded by Friendship" -- he brought out John Roderick to join him on a few songs (I remember Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner" being one of them).  From my corner-room vantage point, it was all a little surreal: six hours before I was sitting in my dining room in a blazes-hot Phoenix having a lunch of leftovers with my wife and Little Boy Blue, and now I was in some high-altitude lakeside resort with musicians and comedians and people who were very excited to be there laughing at inside jokes.  It was like the plot of every great middle-school novel -- outsider gets transported to an entirely different world with fantastic rituals and secrets.  ("Harry Potter and the Slithery Stand-Up")

But lest you think that it was a clique-y crowd, I think my favorite thing about the conference was that it was decidedly not.  From my first meal that Friday night right after the Hodgman benediction to the lunch on Sunday afternoon, there was an openness to conversation and discovery that was quite unlike any convention I've been to.  Kindiefest had some of that, but that was aided by everybody having the same particular interest, and the level of excitement -- enthusiastic about enthusiasm, remember -- was off the charts here.

It was that first dinner where I found out that a lot of the people there were there because they were big fans of a particular podcast, or had been on the first Atlantic Ocean Comedy & Music Festival last fall and wanted a more "MaxFun" experience (since the attendees only made up a small percentage of the cruise boat).  Given that I wasn't entirely sure why I was there (that's why I kept asking everyone else why they were there, in what might have been a useful conversational gambit but was probably a lousy way to try to answer my own question) and my (slightly) older age, I could've been an outsider.  But I never, not once, felt like one.

***

The sessions themselves ranged in entertainment value from "hey, not bad!" to "that was worth the drive from Phoenix."  The RISK! show on Friday night featured 4 "true-life" confessional stories.  That style of storytelling is generally not my cup of tea, but the tales were well-told, and that's 90% of the battle there.  My classes on Saturday -- "Introduction to Clown and Physical Comedy" with Stephen Simon of the troupe Ten West and "Making Good Satire" with Joe Randazzo (who used to hold creative leadership positions at places you might have heard of called The Onion and Adult Swim) -- were classes in topic areas I typically would not consider.  But that was intentional on my part -- I wanted to get out and learn new things .  Some workshops were even more frivolous, perhaps (making disco balls) and some were less so (specific writing feedback), so the conference could have been more or less "serious" depending on your workshop choices.

As a general rule, the more interactive the session, the better -- the clowning workshop, which was essentially an introduction to movement you might find in an improv class, worked better than the satire class, which was more lecture-y.  I had just as much fun playing a game -- Coup, The Resistance, a fast and fast-paced bluffing game, in case you were wondering -- in the impromptu gaming session scheduled during one of the few moments of downtime.  ("Remember," we were told multiple times, "MaxFunCon is a marathon, not a sprint, so pace yourself."  Truer words were never spoken, even if they weren't completely adhered to.)

The comedy was great.  I laughed quite a bit at the live tapings of podcasts Throwing Shade and Stop Podcasting Yourself, but it was the Saturday night comedy showcase featuring Ricky Carmona, Graham Clark, Ian Edwards, Shelby Fero, Kumail Nanjiani (battling illness), and Brent Weinbach (whose absurdist comedy was definitely my favorite set of the evening) that was the most laugh-filled session.  (It also introduced MaxFunCon's buzzword, "Doubt," courtesy of Weinbach, who was trying to pitch it as a word meaning "Definitely."  You had to be there.)

***

I've been to my share of conventions, and none of my memories of those conventions revolve around the topical things I've supposedly learned there, the conventions' ostensible subject.  Rather, they all pertain to the people and the interactions, both during the sessions as well as before and after the official events.  Part of that is probably due to the sequential and cumulative nature of learning a topic area as opposed to the individual nature of specific memories.  I'm not saying that conventions for work-related reasons aren't worthwhile (and there could be some fields in which the topic area knowledge gained is worth the trip), but the attendee (or payee) needs to be clear on what they're likely to gain and whether that is worth the cost.

MaxFunCon was worth it.  I met some great people, learned a bit, laughed a lot, and had tons of fun.

While MaxFunCon has the structure of a convention, it's only the barest of scaffoldings upon which the useful function of conventions is hung -- the building of bonds with, and learning about, individual people rather than things.  It set up a place where naturally enthusiastic people could gather and then got the hell out of the way. 

I'm not saying anything that hasn't been noted before, and I understood it in some way intellectually before the weekend, but MaxFunCon clarified it in some essential way for me -- invest in time with others above all else.  That can be with your family, with friends, or with strangers -- and really, it should be all three at various points -- and it should be doing things you're enthusiastic about.

***

Which brings us back to me and my salmon-colored Oxford shirt and tie, tired and happy, dancing to a DJ set from Dan Deacon.  Deacon gave a talk midday Saturday that thoroughly entertained me.  He talked about trying to figure out how participatory art would change in the 21st century with people with smartphones at their side in the audience.  He pleaded for a more interactive experience from both artists, arguing that the hushed audience at, say, a 20th century symphony orchestra concert was more the exception than the rule if one were to look back over history.  Again, the idea that live musical performances are a product not just of the artist but also of the audience is not new, but Deacon made the point more convincingly than I'd previously heard.  Or maybe I was just more receptive.  In any case, audiences should participate.

This is a useful argument to make when you're going to DJ a party later that evening.  All that day, Thorn reminded us that the party started at 10 pm and we needed to get there on time because it was going to have to shut down at midnight.  (Don't worry, there were after-parties.)  Deacon did everything he could to get us out on the dancefloor -- Beyonce, classic '90s hip-hop, stuff I'd never heard of (but would find out later had like 80 million views on YouTube.  It was great -- now that I'm of friends-generally-too-old-to-get-married, friends'-kids-generally-too-young age, I don't get invited to weddings, and so my opportunities to dance are great circumscribed.  (In fact, this was the part of the weekend my wife was most sad to miss.)  Eventually -- we only have 2 hours, people! -- the dance floor was packed and by the time Deacon concluded with Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," he made a convincing case for the viability of real-life interaction.  (There's a whole bunch of joy in this picture.)  Why was I still wearing the tie?  Because I was having too much fun to think about things like removing a tie.

If you've read this far, thanks.  I would also suggest that MaxFunCon 2015 is for you.  But even if you're just an interested family musician who read this far (and isn't secretly seething that the time I spent writing this could've been spent writing two or three album reviews), the (obvious) lessons here -- escape your comfort zone, engage with people, your performances are two-way streets -- are worth repeating, even if you've heard them hundreds of times before.  Going to a conference in the mountains above Los Angeles might help you remember those things -- the tricky part is not forgetting them when you come back down from the mountain.

Kids Music in Kids' Museums (Interactivity 2014)

I've spoken about kids music in a number of settings over the years, and while it's always nice to talk with fellow kids' music nerds, I get a particular kick from talking about kids music with folks who aren't as dialed into the kids music scene.

Which is exactly what I get to do in May, when the Association of Children's Museums hosts their annual Interactivity conference in Phoenix.  I've been booking kids' shows at the wonderful Children's Museum of Phoenix for several years now, and I helped them put together a panel for this year's conference, which they're hosting.  The panel is called "How To Rock YOUR Museum!" (see page 27 of the preliminary program) and so on Thursday, May 17 I'll be joining Lucky Diaz and Alisha Gaddis from Lucky Diaz and the Family Jam Band and Jim Packard from the Long Island Children's Museum as well my main partner at CMOP and a local Music Together provider (from whom our family actually took classes).

I am really looking forward to sharing what I know about the world of kids music with who I believe are more than a thousand attendees at the conference -- no offense to the other sessions scheduled at the same time, but they should all attend our session.

And if you're planning on attending, stop by and say hello -- I'd love to meet a reader in person!