ATLOSCON 2012 Wrap-Up

Over Memorial Day weekend I had a great time in Atlanta attending (and presenting at) ATLOSCON, the mini-conference of the Atlanta Objectivist Society. I also presented a seminar on how modern architecture is much more than just blank white minimalist boxes, which is what I think most members of the general public think of, if they think of modern architecture at all. My talk was both well attended (over 40 people, about half of the total conference attendance! WooHoo!) and very well received.

The few weeks leading up to the conference, I was completely deluged with work, and the week immediately prior, I came down with a bad sinus infection. All of this combined to make getting out of town in any kind of reasonable way almost impossible, and I nearly missed my flight. I gave up on preparing my remarks in advance, and decided to just skip half a day of the conference to do it in Atlanta. That part worked out pretty well, and, combined with the fact that I can stand in front of a room full of people and talk about architecture all day long anyway, meant that I was in good shape by the time it was my turn to present.

But before I get ahead of myself, let's briefly recap the whole weekend.

I flew in on Thursday, arriving at around 3:00. Tom picked me up at the airport and we we went back to our hotel. We had arranged to split a room and a car, which all worked out very well. I needed the car because I had another architectural agenda for the weekend besides my talk: visiting and photographing the Peachtree Center and its adjacent hotels in downtown Atlanta, all of which were designed by the architect John Portman.

Thursday night was the conference meet-n-greet event, and it was like a homecoming for me in many ways.  I had gotten to know many of the ATLOS folks when I was in the area (sort of) building the Tennessee House. That was almost 2 years ago! It was great to see old friends again and begin to get caught up in person (which is so much better than Facebook and the blogs, although they are better than nothing). The highlight of my evening was meeting Lynne Bourque and her husband Stephen. I have known them online for a while, and they are every bit as great in person as I had expected them to be.

Friday morning I discovered that the local public library was next door to the rec center where the conference was held, which made it extra easy to cut class and work on my talk, while still joining everyone for lunch. The rest of the day I had 3 seminars, which were "What's So Darn Special About Firefly?" with Kelly Elmore; "Design Thinking" with Tim Cheadle and Tori Press; and "Wine and Cheese? Yes, please!" presented by Maggie Roberts. All of them were fun and engaging, and a good time was had by all.

That night I got busy polishing my talk for the next day, and decided in the process to scrap all the slides I had prepared earlier at the library, and devote my entire talk to John Lautner's architecture. I realized that since I had tons of photos of some excellent examples of his houses, both from the tour I took last summer and a couple of events I had participated in since, I would show those. The photos really did deserve a wider audience, and they fit my talk perfectly, which was titled, "Style and Individualism in Modern Architecture". You will be hard pressed to find a more individualistic architecture than Lautner's, and I had around 8 very good examples of his houses (some of which I still need to write up for the blog), ranging from his early career in the 1940s to as late as the '80s. By the time I pulled it all together and appropriately revised my introductory remarks, I finally made it to sleep by around 2am.

Saturday morning rolled around and I was up extra early re-editing and revising, and deciding which shirt to wear for my talk.  Before I presented I attended Miranda Barzey's talk on "The Importance and Value of Personal Style" which I enjoyed, although I was mostly focusing on my notes for my talk, which was next. (We were a little late to Miranda's presentation because Tom let his GPS talk us into going to the wrong Starbucks (#firstworldproblems) which I bring up here in the spirit of not being ready to let him live it down.)

Then it was my turn! The room was packed and I was a little nervous at first, but then I was fine once my own enthusiasm for the work took over.  They audience was responsive and engaged, and asked great questions along the way. I had floor plans for some of the houses, and one person remarked to me that he started to glaze over at first, when the first plan drawing flashed onto the screen, but that when I started pointing out specific features of the house in plan and linking them to the photos too, that it really came alive for him. Also, he observed that others in the audience were having a similar experience. I had many comments afterward that a) my enthusiasm was infectious; and b) that people in general had no idea that modern architecture could be so interesting!

I can't express how happy it makes me that I took a bunch of people who were pretty much ambivalent at best with regard to modern architecture and showed them a beautiful and interesting side to it that they didn't know existed previously. It just doesn't get much better than that.

That afternoon I had 2 more seminars: "The History and Science of Five Classic Cocktails" with Trey Peden and Tori Press; and "Maintaining Rational Optimism" with Paul Hsieh. That evening was the big party at the Casey House, where I had a great time mingling, meeting new people, and talking about the events of the weekend.  It was great to unwind and relax with a great group of folks, once my presentation was out of the way.

Sunday morning I headed to downtown Atlanta to check out the Peachtree Center and its hotels by John Portman. Portman pioneered the big open atrium lobby style of hotel (with glass elevators going up and down in the big atrium lobby).  This model is somewhat common today, but never existed at all prior to his 1967 Hyatt Regency, which is one of the three hotels by him in downtown Atlanta that I got to see on this trip. They were doing work on the roof and skylight but it still looked pretty great:

I also saw the Westin and Marriott Marquis, both of which were amazing, but I have to say that the Marriott rises above amazing to the level of stunning. I'll discuss these buildings in  more detail in the future, since I'm out of time today. Suffice it to say I have my subject matter for next year's ATLOSCON talk, likely to include a walking tour!

The rest of my Sunday afternoon included the OHomos panel discussion with myself, Tom, and Trey; and "Exploring Ayn Rand's Theory of Concepts" presented by Stephen Bourque.  The panel discussion was lively and consisted largely of coming out stories and questions from parents or future-parents about gayness and kids. Stephen's talk was just getting interesting when he unfortunately ran out of time, but he had some interesting observations on the topic.

It's hard to decide which aspect of the conference I enjoyed most, between seeing old friends, giving my talk, and seeing the Portman buildings.  Let's just call it a trifecta weekend of awesomeness.

Big shout out to Jenn, Kelly, Miranda, and the ATLOS-folk who put together such a great and fun conference!

OCON, OhomoCON, and 10 Days in Las Vegas

I just spent 10 amazing days in Las Vegas, at OCON, The Objectivist Summer Conference.  Each day was filled to the brim with lectures, presentations, panel discussions, and other first-rate programming, all presented by Objectivist scholars.  There were courses on a wide variety of topics, including but by no means limited to: Aristotle, ancient Greece, music, poetry, the rational application of the concept of luck, and lots of other things.  Dr. Leonard Peikoff presented the second part of his final major philosophical work, his DIM Theory, which was fascinating, but too complex to go into here.  I can happily report that I almost immediately got a sense of his theory's application to architectural aesthetics.  I intend to correspond with Dr. Peikoff on this subject, and see if I can get him to comment on my ideas.

But there was a lot, a LOT more to OCON than just the lectures and general sessions.  I met tons of people I have previously known only online, either through facebook, blogs, or Twitter.  Twitter turned out to be one of the best parts of the conference, as people were constantly tweeting with the #OCON hashtag, sometimes recommending a particular course, other times just joking or quoting other OCON-tweeps out of context, for humorous effect.  The #OCON hashtag and tweeting were in full swing most of the day Friday, as everyone was making their way to Las Vegas for the start of the conference.  Updates came in from various airports around the country, (and around the world,) as I drove out across the Mojave Desert from LA to Vegas. 

In particular, I was really looking forward to meeting several other objectivist gay guys who I had either met already, or knew of from online.  On the first night, at the opening cocktail reception, I suddenly realized that here they all were! We were just standing around with our drinks and chatting, and I just kind of burst out, "I can't believe I'm standing here with you, and you, and you, and you!  I have to tweet this!"  Just then someone said, "give it the hashtag homo-con!"  For a brief second, I thought, "Will all the objectivists reading this think that's totally weird?  Do I care?" and I tweeted it.

That kind of sealed it, and the group of us ran around a lot together during the conference, tweeting using both #OCON and #homOCON, along with some other cool peeps (gay and not gay) who joined us along the way.  The next day, Trey realized that we needed to change our hashtag, since a bunch of gay republicans had also been using the tag #homoCON to identify themselves as homo-conservatives (and Objectivists bristle, to put it mildly, at any comparison to conservatism.)  Thus we became #OhomoCON.  The group continued to expand, and now it has grown into a whole facebook group with 57 members, at last count.

It was interesting how the OHomos facebook group came about.  It's actually a conceptual offshoot from Diana Hsieh's OLists.  There was a brief Twitter conversation several months ago between Mark, Trey, Diana and I, about forming an OList for OHomos.  As I recall, the original idea was Mark's.  I'm sure someone with more skill at such things than I could find it in the dusty old Twitter archives somehow.  Anyway, the consensus seemed to be that Trey's blog was pretty much objectivist-homo-central anyway, and that we didn't really need a special place online to talk about gay stuff, and it was dropped.

Then OhomoCON became all the rage at OCON.  People outside the conference were tweeting things like "O-homo-CON, O-homo-CON, your tweets are en-ter-tain-ing" sung to the tune of 'Oh Christmas Tree' from @CordairGallery, to name one example.  It became clear that people were actually paying attention to the OHomos, and that our contribution to the coverage of the conference was sincerely, and widely, appreciated.  That alone was tremendous in terms of moral support, for me personally, and to the group too, I think.

At one point, Trey, Diana and I were talking about all this more seriously.  There was so much focus on activism at the conference (to which Danielle was a major contributor, by the way - shout out!) that I think it naturally bled over into the OHomos movement specifically.  The idea of an online group for OHomos resurfaced.  Now, however, it was in the context of gay activism, specifically from the point of view of promoting gay rights as properly grounded in the principle of individual rights, rather than the pressure-group politics that overwhelms the current discussion.  Trey volunteered to make a facebook group as a starting point, with the idea that if there were sufficient interest, Diana would follow with an official OList.

Activism aside, there was also another, not unimportant, motivating factor in officially forming the OHomos group as such.  Let's recap: Friday night, the first tweet started it off.  Saturday morning, the 3rd of July, we had our first General Session.  This was opened with a few remarks and announcements by Dr. Yaron Brook, the Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, the organization that puts on the conference every year.  Among his announcements were several for various groups' luncheons and special meetings that were not officially part of the general conference.  Upon hearing these announcements, we OHomos pretty much resolved then and there that, next year, we wanted Dr. Brook to announce an OHomos event in front of the whole conference.

Then it got better.

The next day, which was the 4th, the OHomos all decided to meet up for breakfast before the courses and general sessions started.  I think it was pretty random, honestly, that this breakfast happened on the 4th.  But, before it was over, it had turned into the First Annual OhomoCON Fourth of July Brunch.  Because the gays are so much better at doing brunch than breakfast.  So now, I'm pretty much very happy to inform Dr. Brook that next year he will be announcing the Annual OhomoCON Fourth of July Brunch in front of the whole conference.  #imjustsayin

From there, you can pretty much fill in the rest of the conference: lots of fun times with really great people.  Late nights at the bar(s), tons of Starbucks coffee the next day, really great intellectual stimulation, lectures and presentations, and nonstop tweeting.

Among my other highlights:

-Finally getting to know Diana Hsieh personally.  We have interacted through the OLists for several months now, and it was fun seeing how well our personalities meshed in person, as compared to online. 

Ray Roberts took this picture!

- Going shooting at the outdoor shooting range with Trey, Kevin, Santiago, Kelly, and Jim.  We all had a great time.  Here I am, showing my secret agent side:

Pic by Santiago V.

 And here, the group of us:

Trey, Jim, Santiago, Kevin, and Me.

Santiago's picture, (taken by Kelly?)

- Meeting and getting to know Danielle Morrill.  She is unquestionably First Class, and full of good ideas.  Here she is with her also-very-cool husband Kevin, at the closing banquet, where she and I also shared a dance:

 I think it was pretty unanimous among the OHomos that these two ladies were tied for best dressed that night.

- Planting this on Rory:

What further explanation could be required?

But wait, there's more!

• Eric Daniels singing 'Ball and Chain' at Karaoke night
• Touring Hoover Dam with Andy Clarkson and Trey
• Hearing Dr. Peikoff's retirement announcement (not that I enjoy his retirement, but it was really touching and very meaningful to me to have been there)
• Getting designated the official #OCON Heart Throb for the OHomos (It's true!)

This is a blog post that's really hard to steer into shore.  It seems like I could go on and on and on, and I truly could. Re-entry to my regular life was actually somewhat challenging this week.

Suffice it to say, OCON 2010 was a milestone for me.  Many people in attendance who had been to previous conferences thought it was the best OCON ever.  Even without any basis for comparison, I find it hard to imagine how it could have been any better than it was, whether from the point of view of either the intellectual or the social content.

But just when I think it couldn't get any better, I realize that this was the very first ever OCON with OHomos in the house - and we're just getting started...