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vegetarian In 'n' Out food
Saturday, September 2 2000
On my home computer, the shoddy old makeshift Windows 98 installation had finally become so unreliable that at times I was tempted to go to work to do my personal computer projects, even on the weekend. But having installed Windows Millennium Edition (ME), I hoped everything would change. Now that I've used it a few days, it seems somewhat more stable than Windows 98. This is true of everything except the new "Media Player" - Microsoft's answer to the threat posed by Real.com (the one company I can think of offhand with a history of releasing even buggier software than Microsoft).
Microsoft's Media Player is a disaster on my machine. The moment it's running, bad things start happening in other applications, particularly the Explorer. Drag and drop suddenly ceases to function and the Start menu becomes a barren desert of vacant submenus. What sucks about Windows ME is that it no longer has a simple CD player. Unless you've installed your own you're forced to rely on the Media Player. It's a big buggy bucket of overkill for the simple task of playing CDs. Being forced to play CDs on the Media Player is like having to use Microsoft Word to edit Autoexec.bat. I just noticed, by the way, that Real Jukebox doesn't run on Windows ME. That's a pretty obvious solution to a competitive threat.
In the afternoon I was sitting out on the balcony-porch talking to Sharon about the relationship between porches and safe communities. Here in West LA, you see, porches are a rare thing, and people hanging out on them are even rarer. Furthermore, there are very few pedestrians on the residential streets. And there are absolutely no children engaged in any form of unsupervised play. The neighborhood is presided over by a creepy, almost Lynchian calm. It's not a very inviting place, but even so, real estate prices are high and population densities are among the highest in the city. What is the problem? What can be done to fix it? I explained to Sharon something I'd read, that there's a feedback loop between safe streets and people in adjacent residences watching them. An empty street, you see, is not interesting to watch. So people walking down empty streets are unlikely to be observed. Street crime is less risky and thus more common. So people are reluctant to walk down the streets, which in turn become less interesting for people in residences to watch. This sort of loop can run in the opposite direction if people can be drawn into the streets, but how do you get this process going? One way would be for local governments to draft zoning ordinances mandating porches of certain specifications on all new residential structures. From our vantage point, Sharon and I could plainly see a relatively new condominium building without any external porches at all. The developers hadn't taken the street into account at all. Their attitude had been one of "Let them watch television," thus further eroding the integrity of the West LA community.
Los Angeles, like many large American cities, has a rather simple topography of property values, with a large basin of poverty centered in Compton and Watts and a ridge of wealth extending from Malibu through Brentwood, Beverly Hills and into the Hollywood Hills. My part of West LA sits on an economic contour that runs inland a dozen blocks from the coast through Venice and then turns eastward and passes through Beverly Hills, ultimately wrapping around the base of the Hollywood Hills and turning west again and running back to the Pacific through the less-accessible northern fringe of Brentwood in the Santa Monica Mountains. Other cities, such as New Orleans, have a far more complex economic topography, with fancy neighborhoods interspersed between blocks of crumbling projects. In such places, people of all classes are forced to pass through each other's neighborhoods to get anywhere. There's none of the sense of regional security that people take for granted in Los Angeles.
Considering these issues reminded me of pathological communities in other affluent areas, particularly Silicon Valley. Real estate prices are so high in San Jose that policemen and other modestly-paid civil servants can't afford to live there. Full of valuable targets deserted by its overworked residents, it's become a difficult region to guard against opportunistic criminals. The displacement of the Silicon Valley middle class is perhaps one the most interesting and depressing under-reported cautionary tales of the information age gold rush.
As I talked to Sharon, I noticed something else sort of Matt Rogersesque about her. It had to do with her conversational style. She has the exact same habit of prolonging the pronunciation of certain words whenever she's frozen momentarily in thought.
In the evening, John sought to redeem the "debacle" of last night (as he was still jokingly calling it) by going out for a beer. Fernando was over again as usual and he suggested we go to a place in Hollywood. Somehow, though, our first stop was nearby Westwood. John, Sharon and Fernando were hungry and wanted to hit the In 'n' Out on the way. Wait a minute - I thought John and Sharon were vegetarian! It turns out, they explained, that it's possible to get stuff at In 'n' Out that isn't on their extremely limited menu. Yes, you can get a grilled cheese sandwich. It's basically a cheeseburger without the beef patty. Exactly like last night, I'd already eaten, so all I really wanted was a cup of coffee. Fernando happily paid the fifty cents that my bottomless cup cost. It was good coffee too. Who needs Starbucks?
The Westwood In 'n' Out was overrun on this Saturday night with high school kids. Either girls are getting tits at an earlier and earlier age or they're following the example of would-be role model Britney Spears and getting boob jobs. In Los Angeles, the latter possibility seems more likely.
We sat outside the In 'n' Out and I explained to my new friends the history of my meteroric rise through the ranks of web development, starting out as a humble HTML monkey at CollegeClub.com and culminating with my current job. They were all very intrigued. Earlier I'd explained (in several nested sub-parts) exactly how a microprocessor works, and they'd been amazed, as if I'd explained the secret to a phenomenal magic trick. These folks are such great listeners that every time I open my mouth I feel like I'm holding court.
The evening ended in front of the television set, each of us guys with bottles of Sam Adams in our hands.
In other things, I actually started work on a painting today. John (who is also an artist) has converted our dining room into a dropcloth-lined studio and has been working on an enigmatic tempra, cutout and credit-card fragment collage. Today he suggested that I too get started on a painting, so I did. For now it's just a big acrylic doodle rendered with lighting effects and mother-of-pearl coloring, but it was enough to lead Fernando to comment, "You must not have any trouble getting the chicks with talent like that."
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