Antoine Valot

This past sunday was the final performance of the Ten Buddhist Tales. The show was excellent, the audience reaction was excellent, and the spirits were high. I was transformed and elevated by the experience of assembling, leading, motivating and supporting a diverse team. What gives me the most pride however, is that I believe all of us came out of this with a feeling of personal success, and with some degree of personal growth.

We had set ourselves a tough target, a behemoth of a show: an enormous and complex set design, 27 scenes, 11 actors, 65 characters and costumes, over a hundred props, 80 sound and projection cues, all crammed into 90 minutes. 

It worked. The show was a riotous explosion of visceral energy. It ran through the gamut of emotions, actions, thoughts and bodily functions. It jumped every few seconds, from thoughtful buddhist teachings, to extreme violence, to buffoonery, to heartfelt pleas of unconditional love. You can see some pictures of it in the DRD’s flickr stream.

Turning twelve tales into one story.

Rick, Kenn and I had written the twelve tales (there are three tales numbered “Part 7″) using the exquisite cadaver technique: Write a few lines, then pass the laptop to the next guy. The scripts were therefore an obscure tangle of streams of consciousness, from which we had to tease apart characters, motivation, context, and action. Then we had to pick twelve of them, put them in some kind of order, and somehow connect them. To that end, we lifted some select pieces of buddhist teaching from web sources and put them in the mouth of a character called Guru. We also expanded the originally minor character of the Bearded Lady, as a western counterpart to Guru.

It was a delicate balancing act, to provide a through-line and plot for the audience to hang on to while not watering down the innate randomness of the tales. I think we pulled it off, and the story arc ended up coming through strongly: The underlying tension quickly turns into chaos, out of which the insane characters and the Guru reach epiphanies, as the control-freak bearded lady loses her marbles.

Time to get blown up... Are you ready?

At the beginning of each show, the Bearded Lady enters onto a pristine circle of white light to deliver a rather formal and scripted introduction. By the end of the show, the stage is a giant mess, covered in discarded props, costumes, spent shell casings, cantaloupe seeds, cake crumbs and candy. And on that disaster of a stage, the Bearded Lady in tears and the triumphantly radiant Guru are blown to bits with TNT.

Making meaning without making sense

And so it goes with life: Craziness will happen, randomness is in control, and you better have some real, deep foundation of mindfulness if you want to enjoy it well, and still face the inevitable end with a smile. This was one of the strongest points I wanted to express, that one needs an inner core of unconditional compassion and childlike openness, because the world makes no sense. The world is an illusion created by misunderstanding and misperception, and while it’s an illusion we cannot escape, we can, with mindfulness and concentrated effort, approach it like the beautiful drama that it is. Whether it be as an audience member, as an actor or behind the scenes, we can relish in the absurd experience we share, and in the joy of being together.

I think that point came through to some. The Buddhist audience members I talked to were very excited by the show, and appreciated that it wasn’t a farce based on the common misconceptions about Buddhism. I also had non-buddhists ask a lot of questions about the philosophical underpinnings of the play. All audience members were dazed and confused, but for those who didn’t leave the theatre mid-show, the confusion seems to have been fruitful.

I slowly came to understand what our friend the late great Don Becker meant when he said we were on to something with this play. He was talking about the fact that absurdist comedy is becoming mainstream, but also how the buddhist connection makes it work. I take it to mean that where absurdism is the end of western thought, the philosophical brick wall against which existentialists beat their heads, and come up with nothing but various shades of despair, cruelty, resignation, or at best stoicism. Yet absurdity, the realization that the world is an senseless illusion, is where eastern philosophy starts. And since it has no need to concern itself with useless concepts such as “reality”, it instead focuses, in a very practical and personal way, on happiness.

So to Don’s point, and as an answer to the enthusiasm of our buddhist audience members, I think we will keep the Ten Buddhist Tales alive. We did some extensive three-camera coverage on the last week of performances, and we will assemble and release the tales as a serial podcast, and promote it to the buddhist communities out there. Maybe this show, with its high aspirations,earnest pleas, and complete lack of self-control, can be an instrument of buddhist practice for others, as it was for us.

And if not, well, it’s pretty funny.

1. Coding is suffering.
2. Suffering is embodied in the endless wheel of the product life-cycle.
3. You cannot escape the wheel of the product life-cycle, because your mind is clouded by desire for a better framework.
4. Users cannot escape the wheel of the product life-cycle, because their minds are clouded by desire for features.
5. To be free of suffering, one must first understand boolean non-duality: The bit is not one, and the bit is not not-one. 
6. The spec is forever like sand between your fingers. Yet each grain of it is a precious gift, inviting you to develop compassion for designers and managers.
7. Debugging is negative, and unnecessary. Bugs are precious gifts, inviting the QA team and the users to develop compassion for programmers.
8. It’s fun to set an array of flags, and let them flap like prayers in the wind. 
9. If you comment your code, it will bring good karma to you in your next release.
10. To reach enlightenment, pipe your mental I/O to /dev/null

Behold: Sausage!

Wow. We’ve done it. We’ve opened our show. What a rush!

After a hell week that went surprisingly well, we had energy aplenty for opening. The cast was on fire, lots of friends and family in the audience, and the show rocked! It’s 90 minutes of pure seat-of-your-pants craziness, both on-stage and off. I screwed up a couple of sound cues, but the actors kept right on going.

We’re all exhausted. It will take me a few days to process the feeling. This is a big achievement for me, and for all of us.

Max is an old and true friend, and I was delighted to get him set up with a good starter site. 

Max is also a keen geek, so I decided against putting a layer of abstraction, such as a CMS or blogging platform, between him and his code. Instead I tried to build good code. I started with a variation on the Blueprint CSS framework, to reset browser styles to a consistent layout, simplify inner-page styling, and get that ever-so-elegant vertical alignment, the “je-ne-sais-quoi” that makes a site look incredibly more pleasant and professional. 

The logo is an old friend. It was designed in 1992 by Todd Steigerwald, an amazingly talented designer and illustrator, and close friend to both Max and me. Max has obtained the rights to this logo for his new venture, and it was a treat to get to work with it. I added a bit of light and shadow to it, but kept even the original typeface, which I think still works. We sure enjoyed character stretching in the late eighties and early nineties!

In terms of marketing strategy, we went ahead with “local matters”, since that is Alembic’s stronger differentiator for prospects and new clients, until they get to know Max. A picture of Red Rocks national park would click with our target market, and it gave us a warm, vibrant color scheme, miles away from corporate blue. 

In the end, I’ve given Max a clean base to start from. Thanks to Blueprint, the html code stays very light and very discoverable, perfect for hand-editing. And the visual design and brand identity should give him an edge on his drab and messy competition.

The old German tradition of the “year of wandering” is just what I need right now. A sabbatical. I’ve finally quit my job at BT INS, after the eighth year in that company, to explore other things. And to recover from the constant state of quasi-burnout I’ve been in the last few years.

We’ll kick it off with a Mexico vacation, go visit my mother and father in France and Reunion Island, and I’ll finally have time to put together “The Ten Buddhist Tales”, the play that the Department of Redundancy Department has been working on for four years.

It feels good to be free.

Had a good day. I delivered a presentation to a new client in Colorado Springs, and I’m pretty sure I blew their minds.

It’s all pretty hush-hush, but this is basically an old media company trying to break into a lucrative new growth market through the web… and I was brought in to assess their efforts.

I walked in with my 30-minute presentation, and was told the President could give me 10 minutes. So I crammed through, with more passion and less detail, and he stayed in the room for 20 minutes. Then he left, and I re-started the presentation for the executive who was the intended audience, and who had come in late. Ten minutes later, the president re-enters, along with his Senior Marketing VP, his Senior VP of Ops, and a couple of others. I felt quite vindicated!

A passionate discussion ensued. Clearly some people there were ready for change, and emboldened by my talk. Clearly the President was enjoying this.

I look forward to going back in there and stirring things up some more!

Third version of the Department of Redundancy Department’s website, this time using Wordpress. Wordpress is a beautiful piece of software, highly discoverable… of course, it’s targeted at geeks, but I think it broadens the target a bit.

For the DRD’s site, I chose a simple theme, and tweaked the typography. Videos will be hosted on YouTube, which will keep things simple as well.

If you have a high opinion of me, and a strict sense of appropriateness, please don’t look at these crazy, NSFW videos. Thanks!

A whopper of a project!

I was able to set a good direction on the information architecture, and to keep everyone committed to a more-or-less standard navigation scheme. There was little I could do to influence the tone and tenor of the copy, but I did help cut down the marketese to a manageable level. In terms of the visual design and branding, I got to work again with my good friend Peter Alexander, who took in the strict constraints that I was imposing and provided me with just the clean look and photo-graphics I was looking for.

I was committed to building a good modern website, with as little compromise as possible in the quality of the code, design, and trying to stick close to semantic HTML. Noble goals. But I didn’t get a choice in CMS packages. EktronCMS it would be. Ektron is an ASP.NET CMS package with all the features you could want. Smell a rat yet?

It was a constant struggle to get it to work, to get it to work as it should, to get it to work well with clean code. I based the site’s HTML structure on the BluePrint CSS Framework, but that got partially butchered by the junk code ASP.NET wants to inject, and the spaghetti code that Ektron gleefully injects everywhere.

Of course, as a CMS package, Ektron fails as many do: by making GUI editing as complex and counter-intuitive, if not more, than HTML itself. Which means, of course, that the webmaster will have to do the updates anyway… and I could do them faster in Notepad! Also, as a typical ASP.NET application, it breaks all the time. And as a typical enterprise application, it’s also very slow, and ugly as a pig farmer in a cocktail dress.

Nevertheless, I soldiered on through. I used an XML sitemap to drive the navigation dynamically, Ektron collection controls and content placeholders and other god-awful components to put together a site that looks good and doesn’t suck. And custom-coded a bunch of tools and forms. I worked through my Christmas vacation in Paris to get it done. And now it’s done.

I’m proud of the result, yet I can’t say that the process made a lot of sense. I’m an excellent swimmer, but I don’t like to be forced to swim with a backpack full of rocks, especially when nobody needs the rocks or the backpack.

Built a flash-based complex data visualization and stratification tool for a higher education consultancy. The company helps higher ed institutions to recruit and retain students. This tool is aimed at targeting outreach and marketing efforts to the right populations of high-school students, to maximize recruitment success.

In technical terms, it’s a statistical analysis tool. Likelihood to enroll is calculated for a body of applicants, and the tool gives a visual and interactive interface to the process of dividing that body into sub-groups.

This was a dense app, with lots of complex actionscript. I started with the data, building a visual representation that can be rendered as a histogram or smoothed line chart, with arithmetic or logarithmic scale. The user can then add or remove stratification bands, and set the bounds by sliding a knob along the y-axis. Each band reports its totals and percentages in real-time as the bounds are slid around, allowing the user to quickly create a 50-student band, or a band of 50 likely-to-enroll students.

My main goal was to take a complex decision-making process and make as much of it as possible as intuitive and tactile as possible. I did leverage some of the built-in actionscript animation libraries, using them sparsely and quickly to indicate pliancy of the UI, and give an overall feeling of responsiveness.

This was the most technically dense and complex Flash project I’ve done to date, involving XML/SOAP, handmade graphing routines, GUI design and lots and lots of math. I enjoyed it immensely.

Well, it’s official! After seven years in the consulting business, I’m returning to my roots in the marketing department: I’ve switched positions at BT INS, and will be maintaining all our corporate websites. My new title: Internet Marketing Manager…

It’s going to be fun to get back to creative work, and to service. Most of all, what I’m looking forward to is being able to work in depth on a single project, for the long haul. And a whole lot of creative freedom, as long as I deliver the goods.

It’s also an exciting time to be a corporate webmaster: With blogging and podcasting coming of age, there’s a big strategic difference to be made in how this company communicates. That’s something, isn’t it? Best part, though: I get to work from home again!