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Dropping the Bass: A Night With Skrillex
Rivers Cuomo glasses? Is that what we’re calling those?
So glad to see that someone has finally put up a Two Lights parody track.
Since I was already thinking about Pulp this morning, this seems oddly appropriate.
One Saturday morning in the spring of 1996, I woke up early and drove down to the Tower Records of Highway 101 in Corte Madera. The line already stretched from the door to the Cost Plus Imports next door when I arrived. People there seemed used to this. Some had lawn chairs, coffee, the newspaper. I had nothing.
At some point, we drew numbers, and lined up according to those. Apparently, other people were there for tickets to Van Morrison, or Elvis Costello or, Jerry Seinfeld (who seemed like a really, really dull thing to line up for, but whatever). I was there for tickets to Pulp, at Bimbo’s 365 Club.
An hour or so later, I got up to the front. “Pulp,” I said, when the clerk asked me what I wanted. “One, please.” The guy working the computer seemed happy to have a show for which he didn’t have to deal with seating. A few minutes later, I was out, ticket in hand.
Back at school on Monday, a friend told me he got tickets later in the weekend. I think some other friends even got tickets later in the week. Though that show had sold out when it finally came around, it hadn’t been quite so impossible as this one, the Radio City reunion show, where I came up with nothing.
That lining up was a real pain in the ass. Not long from then, I’d see it from the other side, and I didn’t love it then, either. Still, I wish it were the option for tickets these days, rather than this silly scam in which scalper bots get the tickets, and they’re immediately on StubHub. At least then, if you wanted, you could make the effort. And, almost always—and I say this from being the one selling the tickets, not just buying—if you made the effort, you’d do okay.
Something about the title of this webinar doesn’t work for me.
Dyson: What did you think back in 1969 when people were talking about the global village and there was this kind of -
Gingrich: The decisive break point for me is 1958. My dad’s stationed in Orleans, France, from 1957 to 1958. In the spring we go to Verdun, and I decide that civilization is important and leadership matters. And in the fall of 1958, I begin reading. The two major works that had a real impact on me were Arnold J. Toynbee’s The Study of History, which is important largely because he gives you this breathtaking sense of history. This is a guy who can write about six or seven civilizations in a paragraph. When we talk about the global village, it’s a good way to start reconceptualizing your sense of scale.
And Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which has in it the initial sense of large-scale change and information systems, with the notion that, at some point, we’d figure out how to do this stuff. He could conceptually paint how it would work and what the Internet would look like, even if he didn’t have a clue what the technology was.
Gingrich and Esther Dyson, Wired, 1995
I keep rereading the above interview with Gingrich, and trying to figure out why it’s stuck in my memory. Is it because it was the moment that a teenage me realized that Wired Magazine represented the most insidious kind of libertarianism that seems to run rampant in the tech fields? Or is it because it was the moment that I realized that Newt was further out there than I’d ever imagined? Or was Newt crazy like a fox, and smart enough to drop the right references for the right audience?
There’s a joke in there somewhere about mentions in the Reagan diaries, but I’m in no place to make it.
