Pesche and Peche Kucha. Two random events in one night.

So my wife Loree was downtown last night and we met at Pesche, the most interesting bar in the city. An Ad Guy friend (although he swears he’s a RECOVERING Ad Guy) named Tim McClure joined us for an evening of great talk at the bar. We covered creative thinking, the value of big ideas, gin and Citroens.

We chose Pesche because it’s my favorite bar on the planet and Tim quickly realized it had now become HIS favorite bar as well. Pesche makes a different noise. You walk in and you go back in time a hundred years. Not in a cloying, silly way, but in a very real way. The bar is the full length of the building, the old wooden floor is a genuine old wooden floor. The bartenders wear vests.

But the real treat are the cocktails. The wall behind the bar is fifteen feet tall and forty feet long with every kind of liquor you could ever imagine. There are sliding ladders to get to the top levels. There are probably forty types of gin. There are eyedroppers of strange flavors, jars of eggs, jalapenos, fruit soaking in bottles… A very different scene from most bars.

And the bartenders are artists. They are masters. Each guy there can make hundreds of vintage and outrageous cocktails… most of which you’ve never heard of. They make cocktails with whipped egg whites, absinthe and a dozen other flavors. It’s an experience you won’t find anywhere else outside of Denver at a place called Green Russell. The problem with Green Russell is that you have to make reservations to sit at the bar and you’re not allowed to move your seat. If you stand up to talk to someone, they ask you to go back to your seat or leave. A great way to kill a great concept.

But back to Pesche. They could have been like every other bar in Austin and gone broke in a couple years, like every other bar… But they chose a different path. They made a different noise and truly identified a niche and filled it.

Well, the evening came to an early end. Loree had to head back to The Ranch and Tim had to run, so I wandered down to the corner and sat at a sidewalk table at Halcyon with a bottle of fizzy Italian water and a good cigar and watched the world go by.

It wasnt long before I got a call from another Ad Guy friend, Larry Jolly. I told him I was at Pesche and he said he was on his way. We quickly realized we were talking about two “Pesche’s.”

He was heading to Pecha Kucha.

I was perplexed.

His quick explanation was that it was an art happening thing. Starting in an hour not far from where I was sitting.

Obviously, I had to go.

So I won’t go into a history of Pecha Kucha, but in short it’s a TED Talks type of event with ten artists talking about their work, lives, philosophy etc. They get 20 slides and 20 seconds each. It happens in a dozen or so cities around the world the same night. Great concept. Here’s the link.

As I watched the presentations, I realized something. I’ve always said that an entrepreneur doesn’t see what’s IN the universe… He see’s what ISN’T in the universe, and then fills in those gaps.

It was last night that I realized the same goes for great artists.

And that’s not to say that a skilled painter is a great artist.

Think about it this way. A skilled painter can knock off a dozen Degas paintings in a month. But did the world NEED a dozen more Degas paintings?

A great ARTIST already filled that hole in the universe. Degas did something his own. Something original. The door closed behind him when he left.

Every great artist does that. They do what isn’t already there, and they do it in such a way that anyone who follows them is just trying to duplicate their fete.

So for those of us out there that aspire to be great artists (and that can be anything from music to painting to dance to whatever), find the holes in the universe and fill them with your best work… See if you can close the door behind you when you’re done.

Oh, and be open to random Dualing Pesche’s on a Thursday night.

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I spent a piece of my day in the National Gallery in Washington DC. Their collection of French Impressionists is amazing. Room after room of canvas and oil visions that take over my thoughts.
French Impressionists are my holy sacrament. Monet. Or Degas. Or even the really nutty bastards like Picasso and Van Gogh… Standing in front of their work is as close to transcendent as this middle class white boy gets.
I can wander through the Flemish painters, the great Renaissance Masters, the Realists, the greatest of European Portraitists… And feel impressed with their technical skills, their finesse, their prowess with oil and pigment… They spent a lot of time making rich people look better than they really did. But they don’t move me.

The Impressionists move me.

Sometimes I’m just speechless. To look into the past through the window they’ve created. I can feel the street they’re standing on, looking across a river at a city long gone. I see what they see, filtered through the lens of their experiences and storytelling skills. I can look at a simple, elegant line they left on the canvas and see that it’s utter perfection and wonder where that line came from. That simple flowing line that suggested a man’s jacket, or a cheek or gesture. I can’t begin to know how they chose that color, or left that line, or used those few simple dabs to suggest so much.

I think they move me so much because they don’t beat me over the head. They give me a suggestion of a feeling and let me fill in the rest. Some of the huge canvases of their contemporaries were amazing things to behold, but not a detail is missing. I don’t have to do anything. I just scan the acre of canvas and every blade of grass is there for me.

I’m not involved.

The Impressionists give me just enough to jump in with them. They invite me into a scene and let me finish it out, or just enjoy what is and what isn’t there.

These great museums of the world remind me that my kind isn’t all evil and power and angst. There are people out there, and there always have been, that are capable of giving us all something beyond our little lives.

Thanks guys. Thanks Monet, Manet, Cezanne and the rest. Thanks Picasso and Van Gogh and Pissaro and Gauguin. I owe you one. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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I think it started around a year ago.

I came to the sudden and unexpected realization that the coolest car ever built was the Citroen DS. Don’t ask me why. It just happened. I remember going to Europe back in the early 80′s as a 21 year college kid, schlepping my backpack around for the summer. My impression of these bizarre cars wasn’t much.

But I’m a fan of great design. And the Citroen DS is a great design.

If you’ve never seen one, just do a Google search. There are a million pictures all over the Web. There are hundreds of video’s on Youtube. And once you see a picture of one, you’ll know the image has already worked it’s way into your memory.

So why was it great? And it WAS great. Car design enthusiasts the world over pine effusively about the DS. Several polls of auto editors put it in the top five cars ever built. Some put it at the very top. And James May of Top Gear (my favorite car show) has a great video on Youtube where he claims that it’s EASILY the greatest car ever built by anyone.

Well, I won’t go on forever about the technology, but when it was introduced in 1955, it was nothing short of radical. The designers and engineers at Citroen had taken everything done by everyone else, and threw it out the window. They went way out on a limb to create a car that looked nothing like the others with technology nobody else had even considered. The suspension wasn’t big springs and shocks. It was a ball of hydraulic fluid charged with nitrogen. The body was fluid and designed to be aerodynamic. Think back on 1955… The 1955 Chevy was a great car, but it looked like a bloated refrigerator box covered in goofy chrome. The 1955 Cadillac was an even MORE massive, bloated refrigerator box.

It had disc brakes, turning headlights, self leveling suspension that could be raised or lowered at will, it was designed with crumple zones, rode like it wasn’t even touching the ground and got 27mpg.

They made 1.5 million of them and it lasted with very few changes for 20 years.

Amazing.

But beyond all that cool stuff, it was amazing thing to look at. Still, I don’t think anything has matched the thinking and drama of it’s design.

So it’s on my bucket list. I WILL own one. I WILL possess one some day. Hell, I’d never even been IN one till this weekend. I was up at TCU for my daughters first gallery opening and she came in and showed me a picture of one that was parked behind the gallery. Turns out, I see it drive by and jumped out to stop the driver. He works at TCU and we struck up a great conversation about the car. I met him the next day and he let me drive it.

His is a 1968 DS21 Pallas. He’s the second owner and had purchased it from the original owner. A stylish woman in the Hollywood Hills that drove it for 40 years around LA.

It was a blast to drive. The hydraulic suspension system was impressive as hell. He took great delight in speeding over speedbumps (Ft. Worth has a lot of them… college kids in big cars….). He’d aim right for them at 40+ mph and you’d feel only the slightest BMP… BMP… and on you’d go. In most cars, you would have bumped your head on the roof. The DS floated over the bumps easily. Never seen anything like it. And this from a car built before the computers were used to build such things.

My appreciation for this design stems from my main philosophy that in order to do great things, in order to stand above the crowd, you have to make a different noise. Understand the world you’re competing in and then make a brave decision to not be like your competitors. Citroen, as a company, has done this. So you either love or hate their design, but once you see one, you won’t forget it.

Be brave my designer friends.

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Want more? Here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroën_DS

And here’s a great piece from James May, the Wookie from Top Gear
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gpUHtRVBn4

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