Author: Stagger Lee

While in New York City, I finally had the chance to run into a branch of Uniqlo.  It’s easiest to think of as the Japanese version of the Gap – in fact, they specifically adopted the Gap’s operating strategy in 1997, selling only unisex casual clothing of their own manufacture.  They are apparently the largest clothing retailer in Japan by volume and profit alike, according to the Wikis, and their only US presence is in three stores in Manhattan.

I first heard of Uniqlo, predictably, through the writings of William Gibson.  The novelist/present-futurist is apparently a fan of theirs, and having been provoked heavily by the Bigend Trilogy in terms of my own fashion sense, I had to make a run. Not least because they had on offer a cotton peacoat that might just be the alternative to the heavy wool one that has since become my favorite winter outerwear (even though it rarely gets cold enough to wear it).

Unfortunately, the price was too high for me to justify taking the plunge on a garment that didn’t blow me away.  But I did buy three cotton jackets for $30 each.  One was a black blouson-type thing, with patch pockets at the chest and sides, which is that vaguely-BDU-ish sort of military look that you can’t really identify whether it’s a shirt or a jacket.  It’s also just a bit on the large side, so I deliberately washed it to see what would happen (we’ll find out as soon as it’s done drying over a chair in the garage).  But the other two items are both sport coats – simple cotton blazers, three-button, one in a light khaki and one in a dark blue.  And I’ve worn one every day this week.

They’re the last thing I would have thought of glomming onto. Not water-resistant in the least (quite the opposite), sufficiently wrinkly to be impractical for stuffing in a bag, but ideal for summer in the greater San Francisco area when you need to turn the chill of the fog for a bit but not swelter with the thing in the afternoons.  And they’re sized just about perfectly – far more so than the Saboteur Invincible I spent way too much on.  These two combined cost an order of magnitude less than the Saboteur.

I feel different with this thing on – today is the navy one, over a short-sleeve button-up patterned shirt – and I can’t put a finger on how.  Older?  Not really; nothing about cotton sportcoat suggests “old” necessarily.  Younger? Eh, even though the blazer-jeans look was my go-to throughout grad school, I’m not feeling fifteen years knocked off (of which more later). Mature?  Possibly – who can tell?  Keeping the Nerf gun in one pocket might undercut that, though.

The other useful fashion news from this trip is that the Blundstones that I thought I wanted are just a hair too snug up front, and would almost certainly screw up my toe again.  Meanwhile, the forest-green Levi’s/Filson collaborative trucker jacket looks really good – but for $278, I need something with regular side pockets.

I suspect there’s going to be a pretty aggressive cull of the jacket rack before long.  The leather is going into storage for lack of utility unless something changes, and I’d like to put paid to the “performance outerwear” as much as possible and instead try to dress like somebody who doesn’t want you to think they hike and bike and run on the weekends, because, hi, have you met me?

Nope.  Plain $30 cotton blazer might just be who I am nowadays.

Of which, as I said, more later.

That ship has sailed, son.  The Occupy movement couldn’t keep their collective eye on the ball and, in the grand tradition of the professional left, let a movement that should have been tremendously motivating to the average working stiff in America get hijacked by the usual slaw of bong-watered granola-shavers and Free Mumia dipshits and International ANSWER Chomsky sophomores and Black Bloc gutterpunks.  As soon as the Oakland branch became the national focus of the movement, the game was up, and rightly so.

Back to the drawing board, kids.  Need to start over, need to come up with a new brand and a tight focus and no getting distracted by the barnacles that have glommed onto every remotely-progressive response movement for thirty years.  Load up on khakis and polos and try for a telegenic and inclusive movement for once.

Sleep No More is a play.  Sort of.  It is staged in a “hotel” in New York City.  You go in, go through the rooms and floors, walk through the “set” and experience the “actors” as the events happen around you in a very stylized and abstract way.  You open doors, crawl through windows if you like, take candy from the jar…you’re inside the show.  The whole thing is derived from Shakespeare and Hitchcock in similar measure, and it positively drips with the atmosphere of urban fantasy taken out of time in its blend of the 30s and Victoriana and God knows what else.  So if you think you might be down for this, don’t read on.

 

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(tribute to the old listserv days)

 

Ready?  Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I’ll begin…

 

They led us into the “hotel”, gave us a playing card as we “checked in,” took all our coats and bags and things, and sent us up the stairs to the lounge.  It turns out they’re serious: you do NOT need your coat and you DEFINITELY won’t want to be carrying a bag.  In fact, the most critical things you can do to be ready are to wear your running shoes and put in contacts rather than wearing glasses.

The lounge looks like half a dozen speakeasy bars: dark wood, thick scarlet velvet curtains, absinthe punch.  Fog, or mist, or haze, or something drifts through the tables around the small stage (piano, bass, drums).  No musicians yet, just the compere with his oily British accent calling our card numbers.  Your number comes up, your group shuffles out, and a similarly unctuous Brit-accented lady lounge singer hands out…masks.  Think plague masks as designed by Jason Voorhes.  And your instructions are strict: no talking after this, until you leave the show.  Everyone goes into the elevator, which rises – and then one person is grabbed and put off the elevator.  It then descends and everyone else is allowed off…

…into a sanitarium.  Or something.  Beds, bathtubs, medical instruments, and then the door and the window lead outside into a maze of thorny trees, with a hut off in one corner…and then people appear.  There’s a nurse in the hut.  There’s another one attending to somebody in a bathtub, and you can’t even really tell if it’s male or female or what age. It looks cold and creepy and yet the temperature is starting to climb, and when you’re trying to sidle your way up to whatever the hell’s going on in the middle of that maze with fifty other people, you can tell it’s going to get uncomfortably hot before the night’s out.

Eventually you give up trying to make heads or tails of the sanitarium and just head downstairs…into an empty village.  There’s a tea shop, there’s a detective agency, there’s a candy store and you can actually nick the peppermints and butterscotch and licorice allsorts from the jars.  And then there’s a couple of people having a fight, or somebody crawling up the wall and suspending themselves against the ceiling, and then there’s an abandoned nightclub lounge that looks exactly like where you just came from, covered in dust and cobwebs, and all of a sudden there’s the witches’ scene from Macbeth reinterpreted as some kind of dubstep rave orgy strobelight nightmare, and before you can say “what the hell’s that?” everyone runs away.

On downstairs again, where there’s something – is that a hotel?  A dining room?  Does that let out into a backyard cemetery or is that a garden?  That statue isn’t moving, is it?  Is that another bathtub in the ballroom of that house?  Are those supposed to be Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in there?

You get the idea.  It turns out to be surreal and hallucinatory and dreamlike and impossible to follow.  And by the time it was over, with Macbeth hanged at the coronation feast, you’re equal parts “what the hell was that?” and “They need to bring that to San Francisco so I can see it again.”  It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen as “theater” and I’d totally go again if given a chance…

Last week was spent in New York City and its environs.  We stayed uptown in Harlem, in the chic-for-cheap Aloft, and spent a good deal of time running up and down the A, or the B, or the D, or the 1, or…well, we got back and forth to Union Square quite a bit.  Illness slowed us up some, as did an unexpected blast from the past when we met up three times with one of my best friends from high school, as did weather and rain.  But we did get a lot of things accomplished, among which:

* Sleep No More.  About this more later, except that it was everything I could have hoped for; I just wish I’d had the sense my wife had to find out WHAT it was based on first.

* The Cathedral of St John the Divine, the incomplete Gothic monster in Morningside Heights that gives us something with the heft and throw-weight to keep up with the great cathedrals of Europe.  Which was oddly more affecting than I expected it to be, which I guess is the definition of art…

* The new park known as the High Line, where nature invaded the old overhead train tracks for thirty years only to be tamed into a unique park running up the lower part of the west side of Manhattan.  Never seen anything like it, and I love it.

* Brooklyn.  From the top of a cold bus on a windy day and only briefly, but nevertheless Brooklyn, and on the eve of the formal announcement of the Brooklyn Nets.

* The view from the top of Rockefeller Center, which is better than from the Empire State Building, not least because you can see the Empire State Building.

* Million Dollar Quartet, which as it turns out we could have waited to see in San Jose – but was totally worth a trip just for the closing shot.  If you know the history of rock ‘n roll, you know the one.

* Grand Central Station, complete with pics of Vanderbilt Avenue, a Magnolia cupcake (which is NYC’s way of saying “look, we all want to eat a huge gob of straight frosting but it’s starting to look bad”) and Mendy’s pastrami (which I had the presence of mind not to try to order with Swiss this time).  And Junior’s cheesecake, because nom.

But the biggest thing was just being in New York again – in my case, almost eight years to the day precisely since the weekend I proposed to my now-wife.  Since then, my world has opened up even more, with moving to Silicon Valley and spending time in San Francisco and going to London three times.  New York City has moved into that space where DC now resides and where I think New Orleans may have always been for me: a semi-mythical place made more so by the sense that it contains years and history going back to well before the Spanish set up that mission in Yerba Buena.  (A sense made stronger by reading a lot of Herbert Asbury and also Gotham again.)  A place where I know I’ve been (and in the case of DC, lived) and spent some quality time, but with a sort of museum-Disneyland quality to it.  I know that everyone who goes to New York starts wondering within 24 hours whether they could live there, but for the first time, I don’t think I got the urge.  And my wife definitely didn’t, gluten-free potstickers and Italian food notwithstanding.

In fact, if there was an overarching theme to the week (and the weekend), it was about tying up loose ends and drawing a line under the past.  Having gotten home, the urge to live in the now is fairly strong. Which I suppose is a good thing in any event.

Because obviously America treats its employees so much better.  Duh.

My senior year of high school was, bluntly put, a hot fucking mess.  After a triumphant junior year that ended with a state championship, an MVP at the Auburn Invitational, four aces in my hat, and a monthlong dash through New York and Orlando that included three weeks of actually being attractive to girls, the summer was spent working at an actual law firm for actual cash (what a step up from the produce cooler!) and helling around town with my teammates and my new girlfriend – or rather, my old friend newly turned girlfriend.  Made it, Ma – top of the world.

And then the wheels started to come off.  The second night of senior year, we went to see 10,000 Maniacs, I took her home – and we forgot to call each other for, like, ever. Meanwhile, my guys all went off to college and I was left with a senior class that I didn’t really have the best relationship with. Add senioritis like a mug, as I had one foot out the door the minute I went back to school, and quite possibly an actual depressive episode (so tough to distinguish from, you know, just being a gifted adolescent in Alabama) – and you can see how things might go off the rails a little.

To the point that by October, I found myself actually dating a pageant girl – the head-cheerleader and top of the class at her rural-exurban high school in the next county over. Not one of my prouder moments.  I don’t know why I ran to the exact opposite of what I was notionally after in female companionship. From a safe distance, I might attribute it to showing out at my peers, or a reaction against everything that had happened during the summer and come to naught.  More likely, though, I was just in search of whoever was going to validate me.  It lasted through January, about like you’d expect – actually you could have won bets taking the over – but at least I had the sense to get clear before February 1 and miss the Valentine’s Window.  (It also left me going to prom with no date, which worked out just swell, really. They could have at least offered us refreshments.)

This was also the height of the great college application misadventure, where I only applied to three schools. (The two that sent me applications already filled out and only requiring my signature don’t count.)  I took all my official visits, and I absolutely shoved all in on Vanderbilt.  The local school was still sending me mail twice a week and inviting me to all sorts of events and whatnot, and Alabama did ship me three sets of tickets for non-conference games (and I used them all, don’t think I didn’t) but in my mind I was locked in on the big V and already making plans for my life there….

If I had it to do over again, I would take what Vandy offered – 75% tuition plus $2000 a year – and do whatever I had to in order to make up the difference. Loans, bank robbery, whatever. But I didn’t, because the local school had offered me two separate full-tuition scholarships (including one of their bigger-name prestige ones) and hey, they’d rushed the hell out of me for the better part of two years, and I’d been associated with them from age 4, and, well, there you have it.  They wanted me – or claimed to – and once again, I needed validation. And once again my attention turned, and I started imagining and planning out how things were going to be.  And when it turned out the campus was 85% Greek, I signed up for summer rush and just folded that into the plan.  And then…well, we all know how that turned out.

If I’m honest, half the reason that undergrad turned into such a misery is because it had to live up to my dream of what college was supposed to be.  Maybe nothing could have lived up to the dream, maybe nothing would have prepared me for how bad it was going to be, but either way, it was a bad combination and I was sunk. But that was spring of 1990: haze, allergy, and the impatient desire to just get on with my life. The music all sounds like end-of-the-movie tunes in my memory, and the Nike Air Trainer SC II shoes – in white, dark blue and gray – are still in the back of my head as the Platonic ideal of my new futuristic Nikes; if they ever bring those out in retro form, I’m probably going for it. Man, I haven’t bought a pair of Nikes since…probably since leaving Vanderbilt. That was only a 7 year run, which is amazing compared to my 12 or 13 years in Dr Martens…

So yeah. That was the one time in my life where I was outright eager to let it all go and just move on, and it burned me enough that fourteen years later, I refused to so much as think about what life might be like in California until I was already living there. The moral of the story, I suppose, is be careful you don’t dream yourself into something you can’t wake up to.  But at the same time, make sure you don’t change directions and start dreaming of a better past.  That way lies madness.

Of which more later.

* So it looks like they’re going to charge Zimmerman after all.  Which makes sense.  Take all the racial angle out of it and just look at what happened: a guy chased after an alleged – what?  Trespasser?  Just shady dude?  Why exactly? – anyway, the guy chases said whatever AFTER THE POLICE DISPATCHER TELLS HIM NOT TO, then shoots said dude who was unarmed.  That right there is a prima facie case for manslaughter, if not murder-two, and the whole “Stand Your Ground” nonsense doesn’t even enter into it.  And without a single reference to the race of either participant.  There you have it.

* So it looks like Apple and most major book publishers are catching a collusion case for teaming up to try to stop Amazon undercutting their profits on e-book sales.  This is going to be interesting.  I don’t know if Amazon’s share of the e-book market rises to the level of a monopsony (the opposite of monopoly, where there’s only one customer rather than one vendor) but it’s interesting that the publishers felt the urgency to break Amazon and were able to partner with Apple to do it.  When Apple enjoyed a similar position in the world of digital music (and may still), the labels were unable to muster much of anything – but then again, the principal competitor to the iTunes Music Store was piracy.  Maybe it’s just all the labels could do to ensure somebody was paying something for their product.

* Not particularly worried about the case on AAPL’s behalf, anyway.  When you have $100 billion in the bank – that’s a hecto-Instagram, note – you can probably pay to make this go away with a minimum of fuss.  Besides, the iBookstore (is that what we call it now) is not a profit center – just like the iTunes Music Store before it, it’s a way to guarantee that a product type will be available for your iPad in the event Amazon someday decides to pull the plug on the Kindle for iOS app.  Once again, as God is Scarlett O’Jobs’s witness, AAPL will never be hungry again.

* London Landscape TV has disappeared from the iTunes Music Store, which is a shame, as it was a great 720p video podcast of just stuff in London.  Fortunately most of them are downloaded on my hard drive at home, but it’s a shame to lose a fine HD video podcast just as I get a high-definition-friendly iPad.

* I really need to test out the iPad shoulder rig in a live situation.  Maybe Saturday when I’m engaged in round 3 of the great BBQ smoker experiment.  Actively contemplating a cigar for this one, since the pipe smoking went south in a hurry. True story, don’t leave your pipe tobacco in a drawer for two years before you smoke it.  But just in case the shoulder holster is untenable – a very real possibility – I got a Timbuk2 extra-small Quickie sleeve for $19.

* I broke out the suede trucker jacket – I think Levi’s must have invented “trucker jacket” because I don’t remember ever seeing it before, but it certainly covers the whole “jean jacket not actually made of denim” category in a succinct manner.  I want that classic American work jacket look, and this would actually do it until you get right up on it and see that it’s, well, “Seattle Suede,” some specially-tanned Eddie Bauer nonsense that’s supposed to make it rainproof.  And honestly, I think that’s what I struggle to get past with this coat – the look is right, the water resistance is acceptable, there are hand warmer pockets and it’s comfortable with some heft to it (so obviously not for those 48-walking-out-the-door-and-70-at-lunch days), but it’s feckin’ suede. Which just screams “I need to look like a man of the people even though I never lift anything heavier than money.”  And while that may be true, especially now, the Romney look is not what I’m going for.  Hell, I had to quit a job that required steel-toe boots because it wrenched my knee into arthroscopic surgery, and I had a forklift license, so my card’s punched, hotshot.

* Having come back from a Lent with no soda, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to drink the stuff in quantity. I didn’t even get a go cup at lunch today and I struggled through the second glass of Coke Zero washing down my bacon cheddar omelette sandwich.  Possible healthy development?  Not as much as the fact that I’m running my fourth 5K in 13 months on Sunday. When the hell did I become, you know, a runner?

* I’m with Josh Marshall on this one: the fact that Romney’s out there trying to peddle “Obama’s War on Women” is a sure sign they’re playing defense – because the gender gap is real and it’s huge.  It’s not like they’re going to reverse it either – the best they can hope for is to muddy the waters and wait for the ever-reliable press to dutifully regurgitate their Golden Mean “opinions differ” shtick. But with plenty of footage of GOP anti-contraception talk already in the can and things like the Lily Ledbetter Act (signed on day one, natch) to point to, that dog probably won’t hunt no matter how many times the Sabbath Gasbags shake their heads mournfully.

* Um, Allen West, your mouth is moving. You might want to look to that. Besides, it’s no good unless you can say “I hold in my hand a list of 57 known Communists,” etc.  Looks like keeping Good Night and Good Luck on the iPad was the move after all. I know Texas is the biggest internal threat to America, but once we glass the steers, can we start in on sawing off Florida and letting it drift to Cuba?

* Verizon’s LTE holds a steady 20Mb-plus all the way through my Caltrain commute, enough to watch the latest “Adultolescence” video from Hannah Hart.  That tears it.  AT&T is getting the boot as soon as a new iPhone drops.  Meanwhile, with the experiment successful, it’s time to turn off the data service and see how well I get on with just Wi-Fi on the trip to New York.

* Recent reads/re-reads: The Night Circus, American Gods, Neverwhere. Trend developing? Magical realism? Urban fantasy? Maybe I really am gearing up for a career change to “whatever the urban version of a druid is”…

* And speaking of books, I had no idea that Herbert Asbury (Gangs of New York, Gem of the Prairie, The Barbary Coast, etc) had a book about New Orleans, but there it is: The French Quarter, arriving just in time to read by the smoker. Winner winner pork shoulder dinner!

Congrats and best wishes to John Jenkins.  The Flamethrower, who passed up the NBA draft last year to come back for his junior season and try to make history, is going to pass up his senior season and turn professional, where he will hopefully be Stephen Curry 2.0 and make a bazillion dollars lighting up Sportscenter every other night.  For the first time in at least fourteen years (probably more), I’ve made a note on the calendar for Draft Night.

Of course, that bursts the bubble.  Now that JJ23 is going, we have exactly ten players in the mix.  And it turns out one of them, Arnold Okechukwu, isn’t even a lock to show up for some reason (and he is the lowest-rated of the prospects).  So here we are, six months from Midnight Madness, and we have nine players.

We don’t have enough bodies on this team to scrimmage 5-on-5.

Now what?  I’ll tell you now what: this is a 14-team conference with two reasonably sure things and three probably sure things, and a whole lot of maybe.  Florida will probably be fine; Billy Donovan has salted a mine down there and they have become a perennial contender.  Missouri will arrive with guns blazing, and Arkansas will be loading theirs up fast.  Past that, who knows.  Cuonzo Martin may have figured it out at Tennessee, Anthony Grant is turning Bama in to a real threat, Tony Barbee is not sleeping down at Auburn, even South Carolina just hired Frank Martin – think Bobby Knight without the charm – who turned freakin’ Kansas State into a basketball threat.  Even Georgia has some young talent and LSU’s looking for a new coach and might get lucky there.  Only the Mississippi schools are going nowhere (or even backward, given the player hemorrhage at State with Renardo Sidney going pro and other guys transferring or graduating).

And there’s us, nine deep with no seniors and two juniors as the only players with more than a year of college basketball under their belts, and Kedren Johnson’s 3.1 points per game as our top returning scorer.

Am I forgetting anyone?

Oh.  Right.

Well, the one consolation is that Kentucky is also going to lose a bunch of guys – their entire starting five will probably get drafted, with Anthony Davis and his eyebrow going #1 overall, and they will be in the same rebuilding mode as we are. Except they are rebuilding with Alex Poythress and probably Shabazz Muhammed and God only knows who else, but you can assume it’ll be another rack of five-star prospects on the one-and-done plan.

To be completely blunt: how in the fucking hell are we supposed to compete with this? Sure, we win some games, and we graduate our guys with legit degrees that actually mean something. Which gets us exactly no respect from the rest of this league. I don’t exactly remember the hordes of other conference teams’  fans chanting “S-E-C” for us against Oregon State in baseball last June or against Harvard last month. We are out there fighting an uphill battle because we do things the right way and nobody gives a shit – win games and hang banners, that’s what’s important around here. Not that we’re getting a lot of respect for winning the SEC Tournament and being one of only two UK losses all year – everyone rolls their eyes and says Kentucky doesn’t care about conference titles and assumes we luck-boxed into it because the Wildcats decided to phone one in. Personally, I’d say it’s a failure of leadership if you can’t get your team fired up for a trophy game, but whatever.

But the point remains the same: there is absolutely no way we can hope to routinely compete in this kind of environment. We sunk two years into recruiting Poythress, a local product who we were on from the start, and it availed us exactly nothing.  We took the most talented Vanderbilt team in a generation or more – possibly ever – and managed to beat Kentucky one time in three tries; played them close, sure, made them sweat, but the columns are WON and LOST.  Nothing on there about “Made them work for it” or “Tried hard and looked good doing it.”  We took our best shot these last two years, and went 1-2 in the Big Dance and won a single conference tournament.

Now, things could have turned out different.  If Festus Ezili could have not gotten hurt.  Or not gotten jobbed by the NCAA.  If one of those overtime games against a ranked opponent could have gone slightly differently, if one of those second half leads could have stood up, if the referees could have actually stopped calling a charge for bringing the ball up the court and instead whistled Wisconsin for two guys holding down our center under the basket.

If. If. If ifs and buts were bros and sluts we’d all have been laid on prom night.

So we’re back to the eternal question: is it worth staying in college basketball’s penthouse suite, pocketing the money, finishing fair-to-middling year in and year out and hoping for a touch of glory once a decade, and knowing that every year means an ass-kicking contest against a big blue and/or orange monster with twenty legs and no ass? Are we prepared to live with “at least we’re finishing sixth the right way” for the next ten to twenty years again?

Or is it time to start thinking about circumstances where “who we are and want to be” and “whether we can win” isn’t an either-or choice?

One billion dollars.

Instagram has thirteen employees.  At their last round of funding, according to Om Malik, they were valued prospectively at $500 million.  Now it’s double that, and on paper, each employee just hit the lotto for about $77 million.

If you didn’t think we were entering a new tech bubble, abandon your misapprehension. Facebook is apparently going compete with Google to be the Microsoft of the new bubble – and they’re using their pre-IPO magic unicorn rainbow money to acquire their way to the top. Om Malik nailed it – Instagram figured out mobile in a way Facebook never has, and represented a legit threat.  He doesn’t say as much, but the Android client launch last week simultaneously made an acquisition more plausible and more necessary for Facebook.

I don’t have a lot on Instagram.  In fact, I think I took maybe one picture before the Android launch, which was enough to prompt me to go back and look again.  But it’s not connected to anything else – I certainly don’t use my Twitter or Facebook as a login credential – and I fully anticipate that Instagram will suffer a similar fate as Gowalla, or Dodgeball, or any number of other companies that get acquired, sublimated, and ultimately digested by their parent.  Without going into too many details, I’ve witnessed at fairly close range the process by which a startup gets eaten by a big company – and no matter how independently they profess to run it or maintain its existing culture and whatnot, the fact is that eventually that smaller company will get completely subsumed by its parent.  The founders invariably roll out before long – the kind of mentality that drives the person behind a startup is generally HIGHLY incompatible with living as one cell of a larger corporate entity.  So if you’re an Instagram fan who doesn’t care for anything about Facebook, you need to start planning NOW for life after Instagram.

Thing is, I think social networking is starting to peak.  I don’t know how much further Facebook has to grow if my mother is on it.  More to the point, the hip social-networking app in the Valley these days is Path, a sort of one-stop hybrid of Foursquare and Instagram and Twitter that explicitly caps you at 150 friends (go Wiki “Dunbar’s Number” for an explanation of why 150).  I can completely see Twitter becoming the mechanism of following athletes and bloggers and landmarks while Path (or a similarly-curated app) is the VIP room for actual two-way social networking.  Where Facebook failed – and where Google+ has yet to get traction – is in the concept of more granular social circles, which Facebook utterly failed to provide when it threw open the floodgates after tying one’s real name to the network.

More to the point, though, I think Facebook has crossed the line once too often with the bleeding-edge Valley crowd.  The number of people bailing out of FB (or proudly claiming they were never one it) seems to be growing, and Facebook itself is getting more and more of the AOL stench about it.  And lest we forget, AOL is selling off intellectual property to Microsoft to raise operating capital – a move Gizmodo compared to “selling sperm to make the cable bill”.  I’d be interested to know how much of AOL’s revenue comes from old dialup accounts that people forgot to cancel.

But then, maybe I’m not in the demo for social networking.  I was barely on the fringes of Friendster (except for one memorable interview), I never had anything to do with MySpace (hopelessly juvenile by the time it went big), and Facebook – aside from the “rolling high school reunion” effect – has only been of marginal interest in recent years when it’s not trying to whore my personal information out for cash on the sly.  Maybe I just don’t know what’s doing with social networking and I’m not the target.

I can tell you this, though: when a 13-man company with one product and no profit strategy is worth a billion dollars, we’re on full-tilt bubble watch.

When Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein launched their new sketch show in January of 2011, they teased it with a music video on YouTube with the clever hook of “The dream of the ’90s is alive in Portland.”  Which was an apt tagline for a town that I once described as “what if my (gifted alternative magnet) high school was its own city”.  And when you think about it – grunge and flannel and alternative music back when that label meant anything and the first Dr Martens company store in America – you could almost sort of make a case that it was true.

I’ve actually been vulnerable lately to a certain measure of my own 90s nostalgia, although it’s important to distinguish between the late 1990s go-go technology-boom era and the early half of the decade.  And that early part of the decade really felt different from what had come before.  The Berlin Wall was down, the Cold War was done, the Soviet Union ceased to exist on Christmas Day 1991- the principal motive force in our politics and foreign affairs was not part of the picture anymore.  We won the war, more or less, and there was a very real sense that the “peace dividend” – in budget terms, sure, but also in terms of mindshare and human effort – could be turned toward bigger and better things.  And then, to get a couple of mid-forty-something New South Democrats as a Presidential ticket – it felt like a generational shift, because it was. Things were going to change, we could reinvent government, we could preserve the environment, we could reduce the budget deficit, we could get health care for everyone, we could build the Information Superhighway. Basically, the new Jerusalem.

And of course, all that took exactly two years to fall apart.  Just like the Millenials a couple of decades later, Gen X got its Messiah and watched him run smack into a stone wall of unrelenting opposition.  At least Obama only saw one house of Congress lost – although you could argue that the Democrats lost control of the Senate once they dropped below 60 seats, given the Republican filibuster-everything approach.  More to the point, the “Contract With America” GOP is today’s GOP, which took a bow for the first time with Newt Gingrich as its forward sergeant and Rush Limbaugh as its philosophical lodestar.  Fast forward eighteen years, and Newt is running for President while Rush is still the guiding light of conservatism.

That’s really when it happened, if you think about it.  That’s when people started to try to turn back the clock. Bill Clinton won Georgia and Louisiana, for crying out loud – can you imagine any Deep South state voting for ANY Democrat now, let alone one of the wrong color?  Can you fathom Bush the Elder or Bob Dole running on the notion that paying for birth control was an undue religious burden on employers?

The notion of dreams is something that comes up in William Gibson’s books quite frequently.  He thinks that certain subcultures – bohemians, for instance, or the cosplayers of Akhibara and Harajuku – are how our society dreams.  I suppose you could point at the breakthroughs of alternative culture in the US – the early 90s or the late 60s or even the Beat age of the Fifties – as a species of dreaming, an expression of the collective subconscious.  And we all know what happens when that sort of thing runs up against the kind of people who experience pant-shitting terror at the thought that someone might be different.

What’s amazing, though, is that the changes get more incremental every time.  The boomers talk up the 1960s, but let’s face it, the notion of overturning Jim Crow and ending segregation and mounting a mass popular protest against an ongoing foreign conflict – that’s a pretty heavy lift, even before taking into account Medicare and the War On Poverty and the race to the moon and ending pollution and the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion and birth control.  Then in the 1990s, the dream was – health care for all and open the Internet and stop the hole in the ozone layer.  Now, the dream is get more people able to buy insurance and maybe do something to slow down carbon emissions – one side keeps scaling down its ambitions and running to stand still while the other hauls the boundary of plausibility ever further to the right, to the point that John Birch Society talking points from the 1960s are now part of regular Republican discourse.

I guess, politically speaking, that’s what I keep hoping we’ll wind up with – something technocratic, wonk-friendly, something less tribal and not rooted in whipping up redneckery.  I suppose in twenty years or so, if the country survives that long, everyone who has segregation as living memory will be dead and the rest of us might be able to shift a bit, especially if “white” is a plurality rather than a majority.  We just have to be able to hold out until then and avoid completely reverting to the United States of Alabama in the meantime.

Thing is, though, I’d love another crack at 1993.  Young, smart, charismatic leadership, and the idea that brains and creativity and fresh thinking might do some good at breaking through the calcified nonsense that plagues our existing politics.  And ideally, something that might shut down the fucking punditocracy and the cable-news blowhards and put an end to government-by-the-conventional-wisdom-of-the-green-room-at-Meet-the-Press.

I’d probably have better luck waiting for a switch to parliamentary government.  After all, we’ve got the parliamentary politics – sort of.