if i can do a shot off your…
In Los Angeles yesterday Michael Britt and I met for lunch at the Pink Taco in Century City. Our server, a beautiful young woman, introduced herself and the equally beautiful trainee that was shadowing her. After the customary “I’ll give you guys a minute,” she came back around and said with sorority verve; “so fellas it’s Friday afternoon wanna do a pitcher of margaritas?”
I immediately thought; “Only if I can do a shot of tequila off your cleavage.”
I know, classless and male. But affecting a lets-get-this-party-going vibe to two dudes that are old enough be her father so she can up sell the check is almost as trashy as my response.
We went old school and ordered a couple of beers. Britt and I made it through about three sips before Miss Bubbles was goading us for a second round with a slightly more erotic tone in her voice.
Sweet jesus, you can not push booze down my throat and then talk to me like that. I’m bound to vomit on your fake Pradas and then ask you out on a date. I felt like I was at a kegger and Bubbles was giving me the “a real man would have finished that beer by now” look.
Michael Britt, being from Texas and all, is a real man and took option “A” with a glance at his half full beer and a slightly southern intoned “sure.”
The sad thing is that our server is undoubtedly a wonderfully normal twenty-two year old girl without any daddy issues and thus, no interest in middle aged men. Considering I heard almost the exact same lines delivered by a different server at the table behind me, the sorority drivel she was feeding us to get us to spend more on the high profit booze portion of our lunch was undoubtedly handed down to her by the suits at Pink Taco HQ. It’s what you do when you have an eatery that’s driven by the bottom line instead of the happiness of your customers or the quality of your food. Which, by the way, wasn’t good enough for prisoner vittles at a Siberian gulag.
When I saw the look of “do I really have to whore myself out like that to work here,” on the trainee’s face, I had had enough. I’m done with the corporate restaurants. Keep your eye on this space for the occasional mention of awesome little places to eat that I find in all the cities where I travel. The type of places where you’re asked what you want to eat and it’s brought to you by someone who isn’t oppressed by corporate jack asses who write condescending and contrived lingo to get you to spend more money. The type of place where the cook takes pride in what he cooks, and servers would rather you have a good experience and have you bring your business back instead of raping you for everything you’ve got because you happen to be looking at a menu.
link free or die
I’ll admit this to you, and only to you dear reader; I have often found myself on the web starting to read an article only to abandon it for another article that the original article links to until I have clicked my way so far out into the digital savanna that I have no idea where I started. Which at first glance would seem to be lauding by example of contemporary technology if it wasn’t for that fact that on that entire path of hopping from one commentary to another I retained very little information from the journey.
Then I read an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s new book The Shallows; What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain and learned that I am not alone in my pathetic comprehension and retention of my web travels.
In 2008 Nicholas Carr wrote an article entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid? for The Atlantic magazine. He proffered a theory, buttressed by scientific evidence, as to why he was having trouble concentrating on longer written works. An exercise that he used to find easy and enjoyable.
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.
Rather than play reporter and restate what Mr. Carr has written, I’ll encourage you to read the excerpt which I’m willing to bet will inspire you to purchase the book and change the way you look at the web. It has changed the way I write for the web which is why you’ll notice that starting with my previous post I have taken to listing the related, relevant links alluded to in the content at the end of the piece in a sort of pseudo footnote fashion. It’s an experiment that’s been adopted by Laura Miller in her review of The Shallows and the folks at Neuroethics at the Core.
I’ve become an ardent disciple of the practice which I think, or at least hope, will catch on. It’s not a method that needs to be adopted whole hog, but I do think that longer or more thoughtful pieces will do much better if they’re not peppered with a bunch of gateways drawing your attention elsewhere.
- Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows; What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain.
- Laura Miller’s review.
- Neuroethics at the Core.
- Is Google making us stupid.
forty bucks and the balls to ask
Memorial day was the day of the big move from my super secret office lair in Fairfax California to my new, super secret office lair in Sausalito. As a devout minimalist there were very few things to transport. However, the main piece of furniture, my ultra groovy desk with the brushed aluminum frame and 125 pound 6ft by 4ft glass top, was going to be impossible to move by myself. With moving companies engaging in the first official barbecue day of summer and all my friends who owe me a solid living in Los Angeles, I was solo to shift the piece ten miles down the highway.
As I walked out of the apartment, my girlfriend’s SUV keys in hand, she and her son looked at me with the sad, concerned look that one usually extends to a chicken who has lost his head. Determined to prove them wrong I lifted the right front – left rear to you dear reader – of the glass and realized that lifting this thing myself would lead to some sort of hernia ripping out of my stomach in a reprise of the roll played by the creature in Ridley Scott’s Alien.
So I employed good old fashioned American economics. In Fairfax I went down to the Fat Angel Bakery/Cafe and announced that I had twenty bucks for anyone with muscles and five minutes. As this was Fairfax, where the women are more buff than the men, a stout lady with a foreign accent counting out her ashtray change to pay for her coffee volunteered without hesitation. She asked the barista to make her coffee a drink a double and promised to return in five minutes.
In Sausalito my office sits near a small bay facing beach where kayaks are launched. A group of teenagers enjoying the day off almost rioted among themselves to earn the easy cash. And so it is, I’m moved in to the new super secret office lair hernia free for the low low price of forty bucks. I love the American way.
Links reference:
Fat Angel Bakery
Alien
the press praises the pictures in the book i shot in france
- “Gorgeous color photographs…” – June Sawyers, The Chicago Tribune
- “Outstanding photography enriches the depictive prose.” – A Traveler’s Library
- “…breathtaking photos throughout…” – Lost in France
- The book is lavishly decorated with photographs from the region by Lou Lesko. – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Wow, that feels good.
Huge sugar to Kimberley Lovato the woman behind the concept and the words of the book.
If you’re so inclined, you can purchase online at Amazon.
if you’re pissed of at facebook, stop grumbling and leave, they don’t owe you anything
These past few weeks I’ve been watching with obsessive fascination the privacy debacles over at Facebook. For the most part I still feel very strongly what I said on stage back in October of aught eight in New York at an Aperture Magazine event;
The internet is not place that you want to put anything that you want to keep private, keep precious or keep exclusive.
It is that opinion that has me ardently siding with Paul Carr and Robert Scoble and their attitude about social networks – the more open the better. If there is a general understanding that anything you put on the web is fair game for advertisers, social network owners and anyone else in the world with an internet connection, you’re probably going to be more discerning about what you put online.
The Facebook whiners remind me of the people I fly with who get agitated when the flight is running fifteen minutes late. Do they not realize that they are 30,000 feet above the planet accomplishing in hours what used to take days just over a 80 years ago.
Nineteen years ago there was no web browser. Email was accessed using a text client named after a tree, and nothing about the internet was easy. The first time I connected to a museum in France via the internet I used a protocol named after a ground burrowing rodent. I felt I was a part of a vast public space that had no rules, just understood ethical considerations and behaviors among most, but definitely not all, of the other internet users.
Facebook is a free service that connects 400 million people complete with image and video sharing. Paying for the infrastructure of such a massive network costs money. If the money is not coming from the user it has to come from the advertisers. And advertisers will pay more if they can know more about you and how you want you want to spend your money.
I’m not totally defending Facebook here, they have been total asses with their fluid privacy policies and hard to find privacy settings. But what I find most fascinating is the dependency that people have assigned to Facebook and the age lines that that degree of dependency seems to manifesting. This is by no means scientific, but from what I have gleaned; teenagers have little awareness of privacy issues, so Facebook is a schoolyard. Many twenty-somethings I know have quietly stopped using Facebook for anything beyond a messaging service. In other words, as soon as they perceived that they could no longer trust Facebook they walked without complaining. It is the rest of the age groups that seem to be absurdly up in arms as if the web or Facebook owed them something. They seem to be emotionally tethered to their accounts as evidenced by their unwillingness to walk away when the service didn’t meet their expectations.
On the other side of the screen, Facebook should be concerned about the age group that seems to be shunning the social network. They are the trend setters that the rest of the age groups follow. Not immediately, but ultimately. Also Facebook’s ambitions to revive the old CompuServe cum AOL model of accessing the web – it’s dangerous out there, but that’s okay because all you need is in here – has never worked. Because ultimately we’re all adventurers at heart and that’s what the wide open web is, an adventurous place where no one owes you nothing and you traipse with the with the same risks that you do when you walk on a city street. Bad neighborhoods, good neighborhoods and always something new to discover.
son of bougainvillea
Matt Haines writes;
How the heck am I supposed to make witty and/or tasteless comments on your new anti-blog, if you don’t allow readers to comment?
Oh and how the heck are ya?
-Matt
Good question Matt. It’s not you, it’s me.
As much as I like to start my morning with a big glass of Sunny Delight vitamin “C” enriched orange drink and read comments from readers who I have upset, I felt the time had come for a change. You see the blog comments were starting to influence what I was writing. Because like any other whacked out, insecure, creative type I was starting to care what people thought about my content. That makes for boring, uninspired, I-hope-everyone-likes-this-post writing. I write in enough venues where I have to be conscious of my audience, and editors, and other forces with whom I have to maintain a certain level decorum.
This hallowed place is mine alone. Most people with whom I have to sustain diplomatic ties with are far too lazy to come to this site and learn that, like most readers of this blog, I like monkey’s and hot women in nun’s habits.
However, I feel truly awful that somehow I have stifled the unbridled criticism of my banter. So I offer a compromise; today I’m starting a hash tag on twitter #llisansob which is short for Lou Lesko is an SOB (son of a bougainvillea). Through the magic of twitter I can limit the emotional flak to 140 characters from which I can easily recover by knocking back a martini.
In many ways I think that blog commenting has decreased in popularity among main stream internet travelers. Perhaps it’s the time constraints of day to day living. This has created a dearth of intelligent conversations in blog comment sections leaving a wake of inane dialog by people with way too much free time on their hands.
Judgmental, maybe, but it is what seems to have evolved on almost all weblogs except for the most popular or highly niche. That said, if you come across something evocative, throw the author some sugar by sending an email to show your appreciation for them taking the time to create something you liked.
Many thanks to Matt for taking the time to write. Have a look at his fabulous work on his superbly named site; one thousand umbrellas.