Tag Archives: friends

did i drink a lot of margaritas last night?

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seanaor was it the perfect amount of margaritas?

we were celebrating two special occasions: charlie at (not pictured) returning to silver lake to visit and say hi

and seana fitt returning to LA to say hi.

when it comes to good friends i have an embarrassment of riches, which i am always surprised about because when i moved to LA i knew nobody here. and i knew even fewer when i transferred to UCSB.

all through grade- and high school i knew everyone, so was i a little nervous that it would be hard for me to start with a fresh slate? of course. but like minded people congregate to each other very naturally as long as you’re open to it, which is beautiful.

anyways seana told me last week that she was gonna be in town and we should hang. i told her lets hang on weds because by then i should be bouncing back from the exhaustion of the oscars.

meanwhile young mr hornberger was rounding up peoples to drink with and all the stars aligned and so many good people arrived including one of jeanine’s old grade school friends who interned at KROQ during the 80s so of course i had a million questions.

and she had answers.

as it happens with most parties i wish i could have cloned myself into 88 mes so i could have good long chats with everyone but maybe you get to do that in heaven. here you get to drink, eat nachos, and thank your lucky stars.

ali and aj came over and we all ate brunch

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ali me and ajthe best part of friends is they push your boundaries

they help you grow as a person.

me, i do everything i can to avoid growing, but fortunately i have been blessed by people around me who actually enjoy maturing, learning, and developing into even better versions of who they once were.

aj had the french toast with carmalized bananas

ali had the cobb salad

and i had the bacon eggs and grits. the grits were bad, the bacon was thick and wonderful

but aj won with her waffles which were amazing and delicious and understated and devilish.

be careful when you order a small juice at square one because it will be a little baby size

like omg i think you get more in a juice box.

i need to open a dennys in silver lake, but not cool like fred 62, but not trashtown like an actual dennys. somewhere in between. eggs bacon and vegan crud for the vegans, but when you order a juice you get a real glass of some damn juice. that shit does actually grow on trees, you know. dont be stingy.

i could drink a bucket of juice.

at my ghetto dennys i might actually serve buckets of juice. $5 for a large glass. $19.76 for a bucket for the table. fucker comes with a ladle. maybe its a souvenir ladle. great, you talked me into it. $19.76 it comes with a ladle for you to take home and show your friends.

maybe call the place the silver ladle.

bands’ll play.

ken layne convinces nick denton that the sky is falling

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monkey glockand wrestles Wonkette away to be all his.

denton also seemed like it was time to sell off the curiously average Gridskipper to Curbed and music blog Idolator to Buzznet,

“There’s a cold wind coming,” Denton told Silicon Insider via IM. “We need to focus on our core titles.”

what world does he live in where Wonkette isn’t core? maybe i can get an interview with Layne later today. in the meantime heres the email Denton sent his troops this morning:

From: nick@gawker.com
Subject: Gawker spinning off three sites — Idolator, Gridskipper and Wonkette —
Date: April 14, 2008 10:26:06 AM EDT
To: all@gawker.com, edit@gawker.com

I’m amazed we’ve managed to keep a lid on this news; that, given your naturally gossipy natures, must be a first! We’re spinning off three sites: Idolator, Gridskipper and—this one may be a surprise—Wonkette. There were indeed some rumors about Maura Johnston’s music blog late last year; they were true of course. For reasons that I’ll explain below, both it and our travel and politics sites have better commercial futures outside Gawker than within. (Excuse the corporate lingo: some of it is unavoidable.) But, first, the facts, which will be hitting the wires later this morning, or as soon as you leak this email. Go ahead!

* IDOLATOR is going to Buzznet, a music-focused web and social network. Buzznet recently acquired Idolator’s chief rival, Stereogum, and received a big investment from Universal Music Group.

* GRIDSKIPPER isn’t going far: it’s being taken over by Curbed, the network founded by Lockhart Steele, in which Gawker Media is a shareholder.

* WONKETTE is being spun off to the managing editor, Ken Layne, former founder of one of the web’s very first news sites, Tabloid.net. The title will become part of the Blogads network of political sites, which includes Daily Kos, among others.

Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.

Music audiences are fragmented across genres; Maura’s Idolator gave Stereogum a good run, but a group with a whole array of music sites will command more attention from record labels than we could. In the case of Gridskipper, our urban travel guide, we could never match Curbed in attention to city-specific content and advertising. As for Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don’t come through the same agencies our sales people deal with.

I’m relieved we’ve found pretty decent homes for the three sites, and most of their writers, but we’re gutted to lose them. Idolator’s Pop Critic’s Poll was a tremendous coup—and Patric’s bleeding-heart logo for the site was one of my favorites. Gridskipper is so far the most sophisticated travel blog: it entirely deserved its inclusion in Time’s list of the 50 coolest websites.

And Wonkette is one of the brands with which the company is most associated; people will be shocked that we would ever part with it. The political site has won an array of Bloggies and other awards; it introduced the word ass-fucking into the dictionary of political abuse; the founding editor’s slippers are even on display in the new media museum in Washington, DC. And Ken and his team have brought a new liveliness to the site this election season—validated by the record traffic of the last three months.

So why not wait, at least till the election? Well, since the end of last year, we’ve been expecting a downturn. Scratch that: since the middle of 2006, when we sold off Screenhead, shuttered Sploid and declared we were “hunkering down”, we’ve been waiting for the internet bubble to burst. No, really, this time. And, even if not, better safe than sorry; and better too early than too late.

Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in traffic by about 90% a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an advertising recession. We need to concentrate our energies, and the time of Chris Batty’s sales group, on the sites with the greatest potential for audience and advertising.

The dozen sites that remain represent some 97% or our 228m pageviews per month, and an even higher proportion of our growth and advertising revenue. (Key facts are below, in case anyone asks.) We’ll be able to devote more attention to breakouts such as Jezebel and io9, as well as established titles such as Gizmodo and Kotaku, which are becoming utterly dominant in their domains. And, then, once this recession is done with, and we come up from the bunker to survey the internet wasteland around us, we can decide on what new territories we want to colonize.

Both Noah and I are around to answer any questions. On email, IM, or phone. I’m xxx-xxx-xxx and Noah is on xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Regards

Nick

congrats to ken, sara, and the readers of Wonkette. it will be fascinating to see what that site can do with Ken Layne running the whole thing.

and special thanks to basart for the early morning email tipping me off.

today my friend is running for congress in austin

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– and he’ll probably win

many moons ago i was lucky enough to meet mr dan grant. he was interviewing for a job and i happened to be the guy who was hiring. dan was a dashing, funny, incredibly sharp gentleman who seemed like a throwback to a better time when men were well-rounded and intelligent and worldly and bright.

for some reason dan reminded me sort of like a sober dean martin – handsome, suave, witty, and completely personable.

of course i hired him and he worked for us for about a year i think and right as the internet boom was begining to collapse and it became my job to lay people off, dan volunteered to part ways with us so that we could save one job of someone who wanted to stay on board.

dan, you see, had arranged to move to Kosovo to help ensure fair democratic voting procedures. Dan later went to Bosnia to help usher in democracy, and a few years later went to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Remember all of those pictures of people in Iraq voting and then dipping their finger in purple ink? Dan Grant was part of that.

Grant has an unusually strong grounding in small-d democracy and foreign affairs. In Iraq, his duties included helping the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq prepare and conduct the historic elections of 2005. He consulted with international military forces and local leaders in Basra, Fallujah, and Mosul.

As deputy director of Iraq’s largest out-of-country voting program, Grant oversaw an unprecedented effort to give democracy a chance in the Middle East by registering eligible voters in major U.S. cities for Iraq’s Transitional National Assembly election. He oversaw a staff of more than a thousand and a budget of millions of dollars and ran the day-to-day operations of all senior personnel.

In Afghanistan, Grant helped coordinate security and policy planning for that nation’s post-Taliban constitutional convention on the behalf of USAID, and previously served as an operations officer for the massive effort to re-establish Afghanistan’s Central Bank. – Dan Grant for Congress: About

Today he is running for the Democrat nominee for congress in Austin, Texas. he has gotten the support of pretty much every important group in town from the local papers (Austin American-Statesman, Houston Chronicle, The Austin Chronicle, Daily Texan) to the unions to the people who ran for congress before him.

this is how the Austin-Statesman described him when they endorsed him:

Grant Best Choice for Democrats

The 10th Congressional District is a gerrymandered jumble rambling from Austin’s western edge to the Houston suburbs. The design is a creation of the Legislature’s 2003 redistricting, ordered by then U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to remake Texas and the 10th District as a Republican redoubt.

But Democrats have been making inroads in recent elections, and there are two strong Democrats running in the March 4 primary for the 10th District seat. Dan Grant, 34, an astute and prepared young man from Austin, and Larry Joe Doherty, 61, a Houston lawyer who plays a judge on a television courtroom show, have mounted solid campaigns.

Though either Grant or Doherty will give Republican incumbent Michael McCaul a good fight, Grant brings more to the primary election contest. He has youth, vigor and deep experience serving in some of the world’s most dangerous places, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo. Grant has received virtually all of the endorsements from Democratic constituencies in the meandering district.

Grant is a graduate of McCallum High School and Georgetown University, where he received a degree in foreign service. He also has a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and served as a civilian in various positions overseas.

it’s terribly exciting to see someone you actually know continue to rule and do it solely for the benefit of others. as you watch the results trickle in tonight, keep an eye on the 10th district in Texas and see if our boy beats the actor best known for his role in the tv show Texas Justice.

looks like he will win. and when i make it to austin later this week it will be pretty awesome if i get to shake the hand of a nominee for congress and be able to say, i knew that guy way back when only hundreds of people knew he was awesome. now tens of thousands know it and will probably vote for him. stay tuned.

why i love ken layne

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by tony pierce, 113

ken layne doesnt care what you think. he doesnt care what your momma thinks. and he damn well sure doesnt care what the interwebs think.

layne’s Sploid was given the axe recently by Gawker’s nick denton. at this point i should probably disclose that denton’s gawker media is a quasi-competitor to jake dobkins’ gothamist empire, and i am currently employed by dobkin as hnic of LAist. and i should probably also disclose that i once wrote for layne’s Tabloid back before fire was invented when we were roommates on haight street, and now i live in an apartment that layne handed over to me when he moved out to marry his dear wife.

i cried at laynes wedding, i danced in his former backyard (which is now welch’s), and i banged a teenager in the closet where he once wrote for the Online Journalism Review and even had her sign the door jamb as proof that i wasnt dreaming. something that im sure was inspired by ken’s ghost. even though he was far from dead.

but Sploid is dead and our pal layne is pissed and he’s not going down with a whimper, like others have when theyd been axed and lived to blog about it.

layne laid it out in a blog post that appears to take jabs at denton, other blogs, and even the company that nearly bought Sploid. and by jabs i mean body blows.

ken layne, pictured, has a right to be peeved. he had a good thing going there. it wasnt going to take over the world, but most of the blogs on the technorati top 100 arent gonna take over the world either no matter what they think. the world is impervious to bloggers — or communists. both make a big noise but at the end of the day they are just another passing fad invented so that a handful at the very top can get some tail that would otherwise be way out of their league.

what Sploid was to a casual blog reader was a weird oasis of creativity and freakiness, snappy writing, crazy stories, and funny ass pictures. it didnt look like anything else on the web, it didnt sound like anything else, and it didnt fit in. you know why? because it wasnt intended to. and if it began to fit in Layne would yell at whoever was fucking up the program.

what Sploid was to someone who was allegedly building a media empire was an opportunity to truly diversify ones portfolio in a non-pussy way.

and one thing that this gigantic orgy of blogs called the Internet has shown to the more-than-casual blog reader is that a good writer is a rare beast indeed. especially a funny one. who writes every day. for your ass. great writers are hard to find, great bloggers are even harder to find among the millions and millions of blogspots and wordpresses out there.

Sploid had three excellent, funny writers. layne, fatman, and the cat wrangler. they worked cheap. they drank. they wrote every day. they got it done. they even spellchecked whihc is more than dobkin gets from me, so wtf. and basically ken says wtf in a much funnier and bitter way than i which shows you that sometimes it isnt the blog’s fault if it doesnt get ten gazillion hits a day, its the worlds fault.

not everyone calls in for the right american idol, not everyone votes for the right skull n bones whiteboy, not everyone buys the right glam metal power pop cd. and lord knows not everyone goes to the best blogs every day.

in a world where the daily show, colbert, the factor, and the onion draw millions of people every day to laugh at the attrocities of this fucked up game called life, how could someone think that Spolid, if positioned and marketed right, couldnt reach that demographic online?

its not kens fault that hes ahead of the game and writes so much better than most bloggers that it comes across as french. and it certainly isnt fat man’s fault.

anyway i love ken because of headlines like this: GOODBYE FOREVER

ledes like this: Just like YouTube, Lebanon, Joe Lieberman, newspaper circulation and airline travel, Sploid is being demolished.

and runs like this:

And then some months passed and nobody much read the site and Choire got hired by the New York Observer (he is now the guy in the fedora and trenchcoat). And pretty soon it was just your editor in Reno ranting about Katrina and his drowned hometown all the time. Weirdly, the readership doubled.

Gawker kingpin Nick Denton decided this was the perfect time to delete the archives and debut a radical new design that looked like a robot had taken a dump on a crossword puzzle.

For maximum impact, the six-hour switch to the “new system” was done in the middle of the workday, so that readers could get a “behind the scenes” look at the world of Gawker Media … meaning, actual login screens for the Gawker publishing system. It was great.

Overnight — or “over day” — half the readers went away.

i will never have the courage to say half of the things that i really feel which is why i tell you on the busblog straight up that im holding back, bullshitting, making shit up, and photoshopping extra smoke. which is why i truly respect ken and the guts to tell the fucking story the way it was and make it funny and sad and beautiful.

its the way real bloggers are supposed to be every day, and every day we fail.

somehow it’s ken who is paying for your sins. now you know the rest of the story.

word is hes moving the wife and kid and dog to LA and hes going to take it out on the world through screenplay writing and country songs. me, i hope he takes up quarter horse gambling so i could have someone to go to the track with.

whereever he lands it will be with fanfare and flashbulbs, fairy dust and wine. the girls will be beautiful and the copy will just write itself, until it goes blind.

love,

tony

in college i had two groups of friends

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i had the nexus friends and i had my hippie friends.

the balance was amazing and i learned so much from each of them.

one of my best friends and roommates was chris, who was sorta like slash back in the day, he had long hair and skateboarded everywhere and was wild and he was awesome.

saturday we celebrated his birthday at his venice home. present were mc marc brown, our old pals mark and rob, alister jeffs, and a cast of a thousand adorable kids.

we ate buffalo burgers and avocados, we drank from kegs and reminisce.

this has certainly been a week of reminiscing.

i got to catch up with my buddy rob who i hadnt seen in years and i even made some podcasts that i might bore you with later this week.

theres no way i deserve any of these friends. theyre such good people. i get teased for being a Christian and believing in the Lord but if you walked in my sandals youd believe too because i really have been blessed over the years and if i ever seem unappreciative make sure to slap me.

and although the kids were cute as can be the other night made me a little happy that i dont have such responsibilities right now because its a lot of work and even though they turn out great i was super happy to just drive home, take off my shoes and pass out on the couch.

if it wasnt for the phone ringing at two am due to a prospective booty call i would have spent the rest of the night on that couch

instead i had to talk to a drunk girl who had just turned twenty two.

i was all baby you shouldnt come here, you shouldnt go anywhere, you should stay at your friend’s house and go to sleep there, the roads are filled with drunk drivers right now and that shit youve got is too hot to get smeared across the 101.

but some girls cant take no for an answer and she kept talking about taxis

and one day im going to invent a snoring machine that sounds like a man who has passed out while on the phone

because who knew all you had to do was fall asleep mid sentence and the happy little problem will just drift away.

today me and matt good did two podcasts

then i tore my house apart looking for this story i wrote about charles bukowski and ernest hemingway fishing on santa barbara pier, but i couldnt find it.

but at least now part of my house is clean.

jim gilliam + matthew good

the year was nineteen ninety

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it was a more simpler time. when the first president bush sent us to iraq it was fucked up but no americans died. except those who shot each other on accident or smashed their helicopters against the ground.

saddam was still in power with his rape rooms but we were all its cool its cool. iraqis had the right to vote – they had the right to vote for anyone named saddam hussein. and again it was all good cuz even though these were the days of imbeciles youd also get voted out after a while.

like i say, they were simpler times.

didnt matter what radio station you listened to there was always something good on. they even tried to ruin it with pearl jam and stone temple fuckups but it just ended up sounding pretty decent no matter what they threw at us.

gasoline was ninety nine cents a gallon, girls would blow you on the first date without thinkng twice about it, and if you had a computer with a 40 MB hard drive you were so far ahead of the game it was retarded. i remember asking my roommate what the hell are we going to do with 40 megs – fly to the moon?

matt welch and i were 16 years old and we were allowed into ucsb early because we destroyed all over their standardized tests. me, i also had an incredible letter of recommendation from the mayor of my town and welch had pictures of the former chancellor with his nanny. we were set.

part of our scholarship was an agreement that we would give back to the community. of course we thought that it meant that we would either do some male modeling or supervise the amount of sunscreen that the coeds were using on the beach. when we were presented with the option of coaching 9 and 10 year old kids baseball, welch and i jumped at the chance.

with visions of undefeated seasons and decades of dynasties we scoffed at the santa barbara little league officials who told us that we were getting the worst team and considered it a minor challenge.

when we lost our first game 79-2 we understood what we were up against.

i had one kid hunting for strawberries in right field, i had one kid in the early stages of gang warfare at third base, and i had one adorable little chubby cheeked angel pissing his pants in the batters box.

1990. it was a season i will never forget. when my college girlfriend jeanine posted this picture to her buzznet page yesterday and i did the math and realized as welchie did that all these kids were either college grads by now or dead or in iraq it really brought home the olde saying that time really does fly.

it does my friends so do something memorable every spring.