Hustler of Culture
1. Only 2/3 of my costume has arrived by mail. As of tonight, I’m Dr. Gregory House without a cane.
2. I was so sick this weekend that I missed my friend Mace’s party.
3. 2006 has not been the best year and I’m really just waiting for it to come to and end so I can start over.
Attended SF Tech Sessions last night and me oh my there are a lot of companies getting going in the Bay Area. Social Bookmarking was the theme of the evening and short rundown of attendees included…
Featured Presenters
Wists: Called “social shopping”, lets you create sharable pages of
images from across different retail sites.
Kaboodle: Community shopping site which lets you create “collections” of products and share them with others.
Ma.gnolia: Think friendster with bookmarks.
Interesting Folks in Attendence:
SlideShare: “The Youtube of Powerpoint” hosts and lets you share presentations.
ZapTix: An online box office for small venues. Down with Ticketmaster!
Wifi Earthcode: A community driven directory of wireless cafes.
Lotta hot action going down. Might have to come back next month.
I have achieved a level of fame I am rather proud of. I am friends with people who some other people might recognize. And that suits me fine. Because I don’t get strange emails from wannabe geek-boys (a few booky girls but I digress) and can still get into some neat places and get few trinkets thrown my way.
It’s a good life.
I was thinking about this yesterday when my Sunday New York Times arrived which not only an essay from my friend Wendy McClure but a piece by Steven Johnson. Miss McClure and I became friends last year when both on book tour (hers beat mine into bloody submission and then pulled its pants down in front of the entire school). Mr. Johnson I’ve never met but would commit several acts unholy, up to and including window watching, if we could hang out just once.
The reason I bring up Mr. Johnson is I am friends (jeez, I sound like Perez Hilton) with his editor Sean McDonald, who was kind enough to send me a copy of The Ghost Map, SJ’s new book which I’ve been eager to read.
It needs no more press here (see for yourself) so let me just say thank you to Sean for sending it my way, that I will be reading it soon, hello to Wendy and we should hang out, girl, Mr. Johnson, say the word and my bucket and squeegee will be right there and this level of fame is just fine. For now.
A annotated list of all 111 of Homer Simpson’s jobs (via Kottke).
The last post put me in a foul mood.
“In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.” —John Adams
(via The Writer’s Almanac)
The run-up to next Tuesday’s election is getting weirder by the day. First I found this NY Times story which has corporate America pouring donations into to the coffers of Democratic candidates in a classic case of trying to befriend the winning team before the opening pitch. At the same time, the Washington Post reports (via Davenetics) that Republicans are leaning on the last remaining crutches of the desperate. “It’ll be worse with the other guys!”
I fail to see how it could.
Meanwhile, from Bob Garfield’s blog at Advertising Age, the ads the Republican National Committee are running against Tennessee Senate candidate Harold Ford, who (no points here), is black.
That may be the slimiest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been to a sploshing party.
The incomprobable A.M Homes had this great piece in the Financial Times about the incomprobable Chateau Marmont Hotel high above Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles…
Built in 1929 as LA’s first earthquake-proof apartments – modelled after Chateau Amboise in France’s Loire Valley, this “residence” hotel has quite a history – everybody who is anybody has stayed here. Infamous for being the spot where John Belushi died of a drug overdose and where long before that Harry Cohn, founder of Columbia Pictures, uttered the infamous and accurate phrase: “If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont.” And they did, all of them: Howard Hughes lived in the penthouse, Elizabeth Taylor brought Montgomery Clift here after his car accident, James Dean hopped in through a window to audition for Rebel Without a Cause. More recently, the Red Hot Chili Peppers recorded most of an album while in residence.
The hotel is a well-known hideaway for both those who live here and those who come in from around the world, and with all that comes an oxymoron – privacy and exposure in equal doses. The rooms and public spaces are a safe haven for people who are perpetually over-exposed, the building’s architecture and decor like a heavy drape to cloak oneself. The hotel is a little bit of paradise, a perfect stage set for the fantasy narrative we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are doing in this place.
On the city itself…
Los Angeles is like a mistress who cannot be fully possessed – beautiful, elusive, ever changing; the most thrilling of seductions. Languid, laconic, especially in summer, the humid haze lulls me into a stupor of attraction and desire. It can be experienced in a seemingly inexhaustible number of ways – think of the noirish world of James Ellroy, the decadence of Bret Easton Ellis, the urbane insight of Mike Davis and Joan Didion. It is a city of many cities, vast in its sprawl with great depth of cultures and fast becoming an international destination for art, music, architecture.
(via LA Observed)
You’d expect them to have more swagger than this. But the nice boys who play guitar in the band seem as amazed by their success as the rest of us.
