Category: Uncategorized

Valedictory Forbidding Mourning (slight return)

One difference between being 20 and being 40 is that where I used to think about life situations, I now think about patterns and cycles. For the fourth time now I am in the pattern called “the end of a social circle”. There was the set of high school friends, then the set of college/radio/music business friends, then the set of post-college musician and artist friends, and now the Orange County coffee house friends. This is, I think, the last turn for that cycle.

The first time was a cliché. We all either went to various colleges or began working full-time, and most of us moved out of town at least for a while. Lifetime friendships from that early are rare in the land of sprawl and mobility. The changes were quick and brutal, but at 18 I was flexible, and I had an exciting new world to explore. I remember friends breaking down and weeping over spring break when we all met up back home, but soon enough we all got over it and forgot each other.

The college experience is another cliché. There were the usual dormitory neighbors and classmates, but my permanent group surrounded the radio station. We were elitist culture geeks and lived for pop music, and it was the classic big circle of 20somethings sharing a subculture. That group lasted past college mostly because I went into entertainment journalism and carried my scene with me; my friends were musicians, music business types, or at least obsessed scenester fans. We carried our college culture with us.

The end of that one was harsher. I lost my cool job and left that business. Flat broke, without connections, and in deep clinical depression, I was of no use to anyone. Yet another cliché showed up: the entertainment people who only love you if you’re in the business. A condensed symbol arrived one night when a we had dinner and then talked at a friend’s apartment until very late. I had no car and my friend J. had given me a ride. As we were leaving, she abruptly said that she could not take me home, that it was the wrong direction and too late, and left. I walked a mile to the bus stop, then waited an hour and a half for the 24-hour bus down Santa Monica Boulevard back home. Sitting on a West L.A. bus bench looking across the street at a car wash on a cold foggy night, I realized I was out for good.

The friends I kept were musicians, artists, and young urban failures (we called ourselves yuffies). Most of us worked crap temp jobs and lived in bad neighborhoods. We were on the outside. None of the bands got signed, none of the art got sold, none of the stories were published. We were bound by a particularly Angeleno sub-Bohemian bitterness and sat around in little apartments in Van Nuys drinking cheap beer and cracking sick jokes. That group got me through the riots, the fires, the floods, the earthquake, the recession, the first Bush administration, and everything else that made the early 1990s a horribly shitty time to be in your late twenties.

Then my dad died and I moved back down to Orange County and lost all those people. I miss them; they were genuine, and creative, and loyal. Geography is a bitch. I talk to maybe two of them now.

One day in 1996, between jobs and getting my car fixed, I wandered down the street and sat down at a coffeehouse to kill two hours. I have stayed for nearly a decade. Here was another outsider group: an assortment of slackers, computer geeks, subculture kids, perpetual students, and mostly a loose group that had known each other since high school. I met some people who may be friends for life. It felt like a permanent social group to me. I guess you’d call that blindness.

Almost all of these people are fifteen or so years younger than me. A lot of them have felt stuck for a long time: stuck in high school, stuck in their home towns, stuck in bad situations in their lives. They are unsticking themselves and moving on. The ones closer to my age are unsticking themselves too. I am happy for all of them. Being stuck is horrible.

It’s taken me forever to figure this out, but what I’ve done is circled the whole way back and re-created my high school friendships, somehow assuming they’ll continue this time. In the same town, within sight of the school itself, I’ve joined the gang of outsiders with a spark that I had in 1981. I have performed a service as the Ghost of Christmas Future, and that work is fairly well done.

And I’m done with social circles too, I think. The choices for middle age are pathos or solitude. I’ll take the latter. I have a lot of reading to catch up on, and letters to write to my friends, wherever they end up.

Soylent Green, M.D.

If you are having “issues” or “a situation” or “some problem of a personal nature” at my job, you get referred to these assholes, who will recommend an appropriately inexpensive short-term fix for what ails you, and counsel you out of long-term psychotherapy or expensive drugs for your madness or drug habit.

If you’re just sick, the insurance company will push you pretty hard to call these other assholes, who will recommend an appropriately inexpensive approach to what ails you, and counsel you out of surgery or expensive drugs.

They’re both promoted to the employee as caring, committed professionals who will help you through hard decisions, and to the business as cost control.

This is how we ration health care in my country, by hiding triage behind a helpful smile.

Where your mutual fund money is going (WSJ)

Short version: whores, private jets, and rented dwarves. P. Diddy is running your 401(k).

A Wall Street Affair: This Bachelor Party Gets Lots of Attention Probe Centers on Payments For Fidelity Star’s Bash; Private Jet to South Beach

By SUSANNE CRAIG and JOHN HECHINGER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 18, 2005

Even by Wall Street’s over-the-top standards, the March 2003 bachelor party for Thomas Bruderman, a onetime star trader for Fidelity Investments, was an event to remember.

The festivities began with a trip by private jet from Boston to a small airport outside New York City. There, the revelers picked up some Wall Street traders and at least two women who investigators suspect may have been paid for their attendance, say people familiar with the matter. The partygoers — including the groom-to-be, who was getting ready to marry the daughter of former Tyco International Ltd. boss L. Dennis Kozlowski — then continued to trendy South Beach in Miami. The fun included a stay at the ritzy Delano Hotel for some, a yacht cruise and entertainment by at least one dwarf hired for the occasion.

“Some people are just into lavish dwarf entertainment,” says the 4-foot-2 Danny Black, a part-owner in Shortdwarf.com, an outfit that rents dwarfs for parties starting at $149 an hour. Mr. Black says he spent part of the weekend on the yacht and worked as a waiter on the Friday night at a high-end Miami eatery alongside what he called “regular size” people. “A good time was had by all,” he said, declining to provide further details.

Now I say I say hold I say hold I say HOLD ON HERE.

It’s good to live where I do.

Southern California this week is going to be a dangerous and painful furnace. Today it was 120° in Indio (desert town). The emergency services people have put out a dire bulletin advising people to be careful of the high temperatures and unusually high humidity, and not to leave old people, children, or animals in cars, and for chrissakes don’t die of the heat.

Meanwhile, the report ends with this:

ONSHORE FLOW AND A MARINE LAYER INFLUENCE WILL KEEP TEMPERATURES
FAIRLY MILD ON THE COASTAL PLAIN…GENERALLY IN THE 70S AND
80S…EXCEPT 60S ON THE BEACHES.

Thank you, Dad, for buying a house in Paradise 40 years ago.

The Still Center of a Turning World

As a child I spent a lot of time in art museums. My parents were culture vultures and we traveled a lot in Europe, including a year in Paris and some summers in Italy, France, and England. From the age of 7 to 14 I tagged along to every church, museum, archaeological site, castle, and concert in the First World.

Despite my strong desire to run in circles and eat sweets, I enjoyed high culture as a child. I could sit staring at a favorite artist’s work for a long time, and even if I didn’t like the stuff it was a fun game to learn all about it. For an agnostic I know way too much about Catholic saints to this day. There were downsides to this life (my mother would delay lunch way, way too long if the museum was good), but on the whole I was happy.

My favorites were Henri Rousseau’s big, colorful, naive paintings; Monet, especially the biggest ones; Arp’s shiny sculptures; Caravaggio’s paintings; and, although we never visited any of those countries, almost anything from Asia.

I have a particular memory of sitting in front of a large bronze Buddha. The museum atmosphere was sterile and white, and the only sound was that of the hygrometer occasionally ticking in the corner. The gallery was mostly empty. I sat on a wooden bench slightly too high for me, so that my legs swung, and looked up at him. I think this must have been a Nepalese or Indian Buddha, because he had the half-twisted little wry smile I associate with Hindu art. His patina’d hand was held up in the Buddhist benediction sign. I wanted to be that statue, and for an hour or so I thought I almost was, under my own personal Bo tree, unmoved.

That experience is in the library now, and I can go there when I need it. I’ll never be a Buddhist, but I can go back to that moment in a forgotten museum and sit on that bench next to Buddha and be still any time it’s necessary.