Monthly Archives: November 2017

toughest question I was asked all week

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A very well meaning gentleman was tasked to help me on a project

he said can you draw it up for me.

I said no problem and in minutes I had it sketched out on a yellow legal pad using a blue pen

then he said the most curious thing. He said can you show me an example somewhere where someone else had done it?

I said have you ever met anyone like me?

I asked in your whole life how many xbi agents have you met?

even among uber drivers how many uber drivers do you know like me?

I said I am here to do

New Things

Big things

Cool things.

Things that if they had been done already, I wouldn’t be interested in.

No this hasn’t existed before and that’s why people are going to love it.

He asked well what about that saying that there’s nothing new under the sun?

I said I want you to listen to Pink Floyd’s greatest hits.

Yes there were guitars and bass and drums and vocals and saxophones before Pink Floyd

But there wasn’t Pink Floyd before or since.

And that’s what we should all strive for: to express our own unique freakiness that never was before we got here.

And one way to get there is to find the gaps where no ones ever been before.

And trust me, the audience will follow us there.

bon, who hadnt seen malcolm since 1980, gave him a hug

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a nice long one.

malcolm had been suffering for years of dementia

which is torture for a creative soul.

bon was all, i wanna introduce you to someone

and there he was, jimi hendrix

who handed him a thick 1949 Gibson ES-175, the first Gibson electric guitar to feature a Florentine cutaway beneath the neck, giving easy access to all 20 frets.

it also had a carved rosewood bridge.

the men plugged into three story high marshall stacks.

john bonham sat down behind the drums

and lemmy strapped on his bass.

bon counted it out and they broke into Highway to Hell

sarcastically, since they were in Heaven. surrounded by all the greats, many of whom always loved AC/DC and malcolm’s contribution to music, not just rock or hard rock, but damn good music you sing along to in the car

or scream at the football game.

shy little malcolm young, long hair over his eyes, peeks up every now and then watching the angels and saints

tap their feet

and welcome one of their own,

home.

this is a real place on a real day now, here

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you are a real person, living in this real place, and just as beautiful.

your mom carried you around in her belly, she fed you before you were born.

she took care of you after and after and after and after

all the wise men traveled to see you, the cows mooed and the donkeys said hi

above the angels cooed, the stars twinkled and the clouds parted so we could all see better

not because you were capable of magic

but because you just being here, all by itself is a reflection of the best magic of all

the miracle of life.

when your jeans rip or you slip on ice or lose your phone on a snowy day

it’s ok

because those wise men are still bearing gifts, the angels are still in awe

and the good Lord is still bragging, quietly to himself, saying

look what I made.

and smiling.

thank you Rise, wherever you are

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when i was in high school i took an Iowan college up on an offer to visit their school.

a bus drove around suburban Illinois picking up kids like us who had signed up to spend the night in Cornell College. on the bus i saw two beautiful young ladies, Rise (pictured, left) and her best friend Tracy (not pictured). i enjoyed the college but i knew i was probably going to come to LA for my studies.

so before we got on the bus for the long ride back to Illinois i made sure that i sat near the two pretty girls, and i succeeded. not only that but we all hit it off. Tracy and Rise didn’t go to Cornell either, they chose, instead a school in Wisconsin. Since these were the days before the internet (!), we wrote letters back and forth and occasionally i called Tracy because i had, what the kids called, the hot for her, which i no disrespect to Rise who had the bluest eyes ive ever seen.

one day Rise told me she was going to spend a semester in Switzerland and i should visit her. i laughed it off because i was 20. who goes to Europe when they’re 20 simply because they were invited? i was selling TVs in west LA and i was doing pretty well at it. one thing led to another and i found myself not going to UCSB right away. i had 4 months to think about the bad job i had done at Santa Monica College.

so i wrote Rise and said, see you at the Swiss Army Knife Store! and i went to Europe for the first time and it changed my life. one thing i learned was travel is relatively inexpensive. another thing was that people around the world understand American politics better than most Americans. “Foreigners” are able to see past the racism that is intertwined within US politics and question it. miraculously. it made me feel guilty that i wasn’t as educated in politics as much as i should be.

from that trip i started subscribing to newspapers because all the smart people i met read at least one paper and often three. subsequently, each time i have visited europe i found that my first trip wasn’t unusual: europeans not only know US politics inside and out, but they also know their own, brilliantly. they also know several languages, how to drink, and how dangerous guns are in society.

looking back at this, now 30 years later, i feel so blessed that i went on that bus to a college i knew i was never going to attend, and had the courage to chat up the two hottest babes on that bus, and was in the position to be able to visit Rise (and her super cool friend Ae) in Switzerland, a trip that led me to visit several other countries on that journey… because it deeply shaped me as an adult. and i am so grateful. sooooo grateful.

last night we had a wake for LAist

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i love this picture. these are five of the Editors spanning 2005-2017.

without Carolyn (far left), I wouldn’t have had the gig. she knew of this blog and sat in the front row at SXSW as i spoke on a panel with the first(?) LAist editor, Jason Toney, and others on the Blogging While Black discussion and she told me I would be great for the gig. she championed me to Jake and Jen and got it.

without Emma (center) i wouldn’t have been able to write under a pen name there. which would turn out to be my last writing for the blog. last night i told her that of the 10+ that i did, I was sorry that only 2 were any good. she looked at my like i was crazy and said that i was the only one who felt that way. so nice of her.

next to her is Carmen Tse who is a Giants fan.

and on the far right is Julia Wick who was the last LAist Editor. she wrote a good piece on City Lab explaining what that last day was like.

it was great to see everyone. i got a bit drunk. woke up in the middle of the night with nightmares. and i guess that was the proper reaction to what happens when a clueless billionaire takes this great thing that a huge group of people made out of nothing and wipes his old ass with it and flushes.

but something tells me we aint going out like that.

are you good at anything? im not

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imagine you were good at something. like really good.

imagine you found out you were and someone who mattered said holy crap look at you.

then imagine you got to do it.

thats how i feel about uber and lyft.

i used to think that if i was a great guitar player id be the biggest dick.

id wear flashy clothes and adopt a british accent and surround myself with weirdos.

so when i couldnt barely play any chords i was happy.

because i would never want to be a dick to someone.

even when people are being mean to me i try to chill for a while

put myself in their shoes, think about it, look at all the angles.

when i was a kid i loved art. loved it. every semester of high school i took an art class.

one of the teachers showed us cubism one day and she said here picassos trying to show you all the sides at the same time. the front the back the left side the right side.

then in college i had a teacher showing us Tolstoy and she said here he is showing you the fight from the wife’s point of view, then the husbands, then the maids and then God’s

so i enjoy seeing all the sides and when i drive i try to think, if i was in the backseat of the Benz of the worlds greatest uber driver what would i want?

the answer usually starts with a clean car that smells fresh, not perfumed, but faintly of orange peels.

miles davis should be playing softly and the route should be quick and confident.

if the passengers wanna know some facts about the neighborhoods we are passing by, the driver should not only be able to tell you whats there

but what used to be there.

there should be water, mints, napkins, phone chargers, cup holders,

and wisdom.

fucking wisdom for days.

the other day i got my first 3-star rating (out of 5) in over 500 trips. i couldn’t believe it.

because life isn’t fair i don’t know who gave it to me or why.

which is sad because im dying to know. not because i wanna fight. but because if there is some feedback that would truly make me the worlds greatest uber driver, i would love to know.

for example, perhaps they wanted mozart.

picked up this guy in West LA on a sunny day

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it was beautiful, no traffic, i was feeling great.

picked him up near Bundy, over by The Park Nobody Is Allowed To Use.

his wife had driven his car to a repair shop that previous night and asked if they could remove the smell of 47 year-old asshole

when he returned from work later that night, they argued, again, a nightly occurrence, and she finally admitted to him where his car could be found.

so i was taking him to the shop in Santa Monica.

it wasn’t a long drive, but in it he told me how they had met in their early 20s, had a beautiful marriage and produced two great kids.

but over the last 4-5 years she has been unbearable, always snapping at the kids, yelling at him. Doing the weirdest things.

he thinks she’s bipolar. he’s moved out of the house. but the hardest thing on him is what to tell his teenage kids.

he was damn near crying in my backseat.

i said, this is what id say to the kids

say, you know how when your computer has a virus and the cursor jumps all over the place and the sound won’t work?

it’s still Your computer, the one that you love, the one that showed you all the cool things

it’s just sick and needs to get fixed.

your mom really does love you and always will. she just has to go into the shop.

and then he really started crying.

the kkk took my baby away

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even though i don’t look it, i’m 51.

i don’t have children or a fancy house or a boatload of money in the bank.

but for a short period of time i was given the keys to a blog that very few people knew about, and enough of a salary that i could pay my rent while i tried to make it big.

after time there was a little money for an assistant editor who posted on the weekends, but other than us no one at LAist got paid while i was there.

and yet dozens of people wrote for the fledgling thing every day.

and quickly we did make it big.

it got so big that many of us were able to get gigs at fancy newspapers and exotic magazines and giant websites. that’s right, our dreams came true: we got to work at the places we always dreamed of working. and there we used what we learned at LAist to continue to kick ass.

when i look back at my life LAist was my baby. no, i wasn’t the first editor there or even the one who got the most hits. and for sure i was not the one who was there the longest. but for a while it was my everything. and when people today, ten years later, say “oh i read LAist every day.” that means more to me than even compliments about this very blog because LAist is meant for everyone. and i am so proud to have been part of it at a crucial part of its adolescence.

speaking of today, today the patriarch of the owners of my beloved Chicago Cubs pulled the biggest bitch move i’ve ever seen. he closed down all the Gothamist sites and deleted the archives. all because the writers wanted to unionize.

old Joe Ricketts, who gave Trump tons of cash, got butthurt that it was going to cost him a little more cash if he continued to own the network of local blogs.

so he took his ball and went home.

and on the way he carpet-bombed the past. which weirdly is something you can sorta do online.

what Joe will never understand is how not everything is about money.

he could probably never get why 30+ people a week would contribute to a blawwwg for free, spending time writing about strangers, or pouring their hearts out about how hard it is to date in LA, or letting people know about a restaurant no one’s ever heard of.

for some money is everything.

the reason LAist worked when i was there was because i was looking for people who were more interested in Love.

i wanted them to write about what they loved for the love of it.

i wanted photographers who took pictures for love.

in return i promised them the thing my bosses gave me: freedom.

i am heartbroken tonight, but thinking about all the people i met who were once strangers but who became my staff and then my friends is cheering me up because even though our archives might be harder to access and so many memories are locked away,

as Ozzy said, you can’t kill rock n roll

it’s here to stay.

so fuck you Joe Ricketts, and fuck your obsession with money and power.

a year ago tonight your kids’ hard work with the Cubs made millions of people’s dreams come true. and today you have tainted their legacy with your pettiness, selfishness and narrow-minded spite.

but you can’t take away the one thing that made Gothamist, LAist, SFist, DCist and all the other offshoots of the Jake and Jen universe so magical:

life.

they breathed and celebrated life.

while you are only about death.

so see you in Hell.

i’ll be the one asking you where the fuck is my baby.

shout out to my friends, Dodger fans

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of all people i know how bad it hurts to lose and important series.

when I first moved to LA in 1984 the Cubs lost to the San Diego Padres in the playoffs.

several tragic things happened in that series.

Leon “Bull” Durham let an easy ground ball go between his legs.

And my once favorite Dodger, Steve Garvey, crushed a homer that would basically dash the dreams of teenage Tony.

ive never been able to look at San Diego with joy since and once i returned there in 1985 i was jeered with chants of

Eighty-Four, Eighty-Four.

to which i vowed to never return to that godforsaken land ever again.

i have since amended that promise.

i will only return if it is to make the final push that sends it floating into the sea.

so when i say things like “the only thing San Diego is useful for is to pee before heading to Mexico”, it is rooted in that 84 Championship Series.

today for Cub fans, however is a memorable one.

sort of a holy day.

for a year ago today the Cubs won the World Series in dramatic fashion.

many of the angels and saints in Heaven delayed the game with rain so all of the souls of past Cub fans could gather round and see history get made.

i sat on a couch with my mother and we watched and i drank beer and later poured some out for the brothers who weren’t there.

children by the millions around Chicagoland can now visit places like San Diego and not be scarred for life.

but know that somewhere theres a teenager or two in LA

who will never have warm feelings towards Houston ever again.

and to them, i totally get it.