I met Amos Latteier about a decade ago in Portland, Oregon. We were in our early 20s, at a party, drinking cheap beer on the front porch. He had lank hair and a Gallic nose; most likely he was wearing a woman's ratty cashmere cardigan and hiking boots. There was something hyperthyrodic and alien about him, with his lean frame, buggy eyes, and reedy voice.
Last week that odd voice, languid and importunate, arrived over the phone from Toronto, where Amos has lived for the past year. At my request he described his upcoming lecture on the subject of beauty, which The Stranger commissioned him to present as an opener for Zadie Smith.
"Oiler's identity function—which is the most beautiful equation, supposedly—forests, the moon, hairstyles, rustic decay, figure skating, people who are less industrialized than we are," he said, listing some of the topics he will discuss under the rubric of "the question of why things are beautiful from a historical and philosophical perspective and some of the problems that arise from that."
When I met Amos he had just moved up to Portland after aborting a graduate program in information arts and conceptual design at San Francisco State University. We discovered that we had attended Brown University at the same time, that we'd both pilgrimaged to New England from the West Coast—born in a suburb of Vancouver, BC, he'd spent his childhood in Montreal and Port Townsend and his high school years in Seattle. But somehow we had avoided each other.
That changed. Amos and I struck up a friendship. Together, and with various others, we organized a math club, a basketball league, and an apartment-buying consortium (it failed). But Amos's personal "projects" were more intriguing. One of the first was his puppet/slide show based on the German story of Faustus, the doctor who traded his soul to the devil for scientific knowledge (though in this version, written in verse, Faust was after straight teeth). It was an early key to Amos's larger project of investigating the treacheries, promises, and endearing absurdities of scientific discourse.
On a given day Amos's kitchen table might be strewn with Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization, Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, a 19th-century manual on communicating by semaphore, and an illustrated survey of beard styles throughout history. I watched his projects volley among various forms, generally embedded in daily social acts, cut with humor and entailing cockeyed experiments. He became a pigeon fancier, purchasing the birds at auction and teaching them to carry messages and take aerial photographs. He built a hovercraft, which he introduced at a house party, and a battery made of 500 pounds of potatoes. It operated a small sound system, which he carted around town in a truck and demonstrated for anyone who was curious. For an adult science fair he developed a prosthetic ass powered by a chainsaw that attached to the wearer's waist and walked behind him or her, falteringly.
In 2002 with about eight other friends, we created the Lecture Series. In a former coffin and windmill factory known as the Lab that served as our headquarters, Amos presented the series' first offering, a PowerPoint slide presentation titled Model Notes. Dressed in a natty suit and speaking in deadpan drone, he pointed up the relations among fashion models, mock turtle soup, WWJD, ant farms, the rhythm method, and scores of other items, drawing a beery, appreciative audience through an enfilade of computer-generated images of Lego structures and trenchant conjectures about the pleasures and dangers of instrumental abstraction.
Both engineer and critic, Amos had always evinced an exceptional aptitude for divining appropriate forms for his projects. But in the combination of PowerPoint and his unreliable professorial persona, he found a killer app. By freeing critical discourse from its customary professional baggage, and allowing the harness of PowerPoint to "chafe" productively at the content of his performances, Professor Latteier seemed to invent a new form of discourse. He has since delivered his lectures in performance-art venues and public halls around the world, and for at least one classroom of adult MBAs. One of Portland's alternative rags, Willamette Week, anointed Amos as the city's "best fake professor." No doubt he will rival any of Seattle's as well. He told me he has taken the topic of beauty at "face value," a good sign that his audience will take deeper and less obvious rewards from the evening.
Camela Raymond is a senior editor at Portland Monthly magazine. She occasionally edits and publishes the Organ, an arts and culture magazine that will post its first online issue this winter at www.organarts.org.
