Wierdo

An artist must regulate his life.

— Erik Satie

Fin-de-siècle composer Erik Satie, best known for his "Gymnopédies Suite of 1888," was, to be blunt, a wierdo. To wit:

• Satie carried a hammer with him wherever he went, a lifetime habit he acquired while living in Montmartre as a young bohemian. He also slept with one eye open.

• He wore only a grey velvet suit and kept over 100 umbrellas in his apartment.

• He detested the sun and only ventured outside on cloudy days.
  
  
• He washed only with a pumice stone, never using soap. 

• He ate only white food: eggs, sugar, salt, rice, cheese (white varieties only), fish, chicken, veal, animal fat and ground bones, turnips, pastries, and coconut.

• He regulated his daily life to the minute. Every day, Satie awoke at 7:18 am; composed from 10:23 to 11:47 am; ate lunch at 12:11 pm; rode a horse from 1:19 to 2:53 pm; composed again from 3:12 to 4:07 pm; relaxed from 4:27 to 6:47 pm; ate dinner at 7:16 pm; read aloud from 8:09 to 9:59 pm; and went to bed at 10:37 pm.
  
  
• He founded an occult religion with one follower—himself. He named it the "Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor."
  
  
• He composed a surreal ballet that caused riots outside the concert hall during the premiere. The ballet landed Satie in a Parisian jail cell for eight days. The charge: "cultural anarchy."

• He had only one girlfriend his entire life, Suzanne Valadon, a beautiful painter of portraits who lived in the apartment next door to his for six months. Satie's penury and compulsive nature drove her nuts and she left him and married a stockbroker. 

Satie barely graduated music school and throughout his life suffered rebuke from critics, who labelled him a "clown" and called his music "worthless." 

Satie called his compositions "furniture music"—what today we'd call "Muzak"—and would scatter his ensemble throughout the room during performances, commingled with the listening audience.

The public liked what it heard—and still does.

You can hear Satie's greatest hits here.

Gamifying Masks

Event producers who want to encourage mask-wearing at conferences and trade shows should consider what won't work.

Behavioral scientists at the University of London analyzed 65 studies of "failed interventions"—failed attempts to influence behavior—conducted over the past decade.

The researchers found:

• 40% of failed interventions relied on attempted "social norming"—on encouragements to adopt a behavior simply because it's "expected"
  
  
• 24% of failed interventions relied on messaging that was delivered on printed flyers and texts
  
  
• 15% of failed interventions relied on simple "defaults"—opt-in or opt-out
  
  
• 12% of failed interventions relied on product labelling

The findings suggest incentives may be required to persuade attendees to wear masks.

Gamifying mask-wearing—randomly rewarding attendees for wearing their masks—might do the trick.

And sponsors would love to underwrite it.

Mask Politics: Another Threat to Live Events

An association executive, writing on LinkedIn, points out that many of the businesspeople at a live event she attended recently refused to wear masks.

"Masks are politicized," she writes. "Plain and simple. Many, many adults did not wear them. 

The exec sees others' insistence to go without masks ironic, given the purpose of the live event was to cheer on the reopening of live events.  

"For all of the rallying cries of 'working together to get us back to work' in the meetings industry, there were a lot of people who apparently felt their right to not wear a mask trumped everyone else’s shared expectations for safety.”

As long as mask-wearing is political, live events are threatened.

Perhaps eventpeeps should plan two editions of every live event in the future: Coastal (Safe Edition) and Flyover (Superspreader Edition).

Or should they consider my other solution? 

Herbert Hoover 2.0

In America today we are nearer a final triumph over
poverty than in any land.

— Herbert Hoover

We’re turning the corner. Look at this, it’s perfect.

— Donald Trump

In a campaign speech in October 1932, Herbert Hoover celebrated America's triumph over poverty, even though 15 million citizens were jobless and 1.2 million homeless.

In a campaign speech in October 2020, Donald Trump celebrated America's triumph over Covid-19, even though 12 million citizens were jobless, 34 million faced homelessness, and 225 thousand lay in fresh graves.

And Hoover's campaign slogan in 1932?

"We are turning the corner."

Nihil novi sub sole.

UPDATE, JANUARY 8, 2021:  This week, Trump has joined Hoover in losing the presidency and both chambers of Congress. No president since Hoover has done that.

Happy Days

There’s a trick to the "graceful exit." It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or past importance.

― Ellen Goodman

Job losses in the event industry are staggering, with some estimates exceeding 95%.

But to mention the industry's downturn, or suggest that the happy days are over, is to invite exile.

The holdouts won't have it.

Although the industry's collapse may deserve a speed-record, collapses have happened before. 

Whole swaths of the economy—industries that once employed tens of thousands—have been suddenly, and permanently, eradicated.

Some memorable examples of such now-extinct professions include:

• Badgers. Badgers were loud-mouthed middlemen who hawked farmers' goods at open-air markets. (The profession gave us our verb meaning "to harass.") Grocers made them obsolete overnight.
  
  
• Lamplighters. Lamplighters were driven out of business with the introduction of electrified street lights. 
  
  
• Pinsetters. Pinsetters set pins in bowling alleys before the job one day was abruptly mechanized.
  
  
• Knocker-uppers. Knocker-uppers woke people, using a bamboo stick to rap on their customers' windows. The invention of the alarm clock doomed them.
  
  
• Leech collectors. Leech collectors supplied surgeons with blood-suckers before "bleeding" patients fell out of favor.
  
  
• Resurrectionists. These wily entrepreneurs—also known as "body snatchers"—supplied med-schools with corpses until the use of paupers' bodies was legalized.
  
  
• Computers. Computers—often women—crunched numbers all day, until calculators made their jobs obsolete.
  
  
• Lectors. Lectors sat before factory workers and read aloud from books—sometimes books banned by management—to keep the workers entertained. A union strike in the 1930s put them out of business.
  
  
• Ice cutters. These rugged specialists, who cut big blocks of ice from lakes and delivered them to homes, were frozen out by the electric refrigerator.
  
  
• Milkmen. Every housewife's friend, the milkman suffered the same sad fate as the ice cutter.

The disruption triggered by the pandemic is horrendous. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. 

But it makes me wonder, can possible good come from the collapse of the event business?

I can think of two benefits:

A cleaner planet. Long before the lockdown, critics of the industry proclaimed the practice of assembling thousands of businesspeople, year after year, to mingle with suppliers and sit through seminars was unsustainable. But event organizers shunned sustainability, because it would slice into their profits. Perhaps tomorrow's organizers, facing a new breed of attendee, will think differently about their carbon footprint.

Better wages. I was among the lonely souls promoting virtual events over a decade ago. (In 2011, with an equally avid partner, I produced a day-long workshop that featured five case studies of successful virtual events. Getting more than a couple dozen organizers to attend the workshop was like pulling teeth, and we discontinued it a year later.) I have long believed that, like Hollywood and IT folks, event professionals can earn better wages as virtual event producers. It's an exciting, emergent field—a veritable "wild west"—and promising territory for those willing to acquire the right skill-set.

For those who can't, or won't, accept that the happy days are over, perhaps it's time for a graceful exit.