Nowhere Confidential

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THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY IN ACTION

Reader Ted Bruns writes, apropos of my comments on "The Experience Economy":

"My father just turned 75 this past weekend and I found it interesting that my three brothers and myself each gave him an experience. The oldest gave him tickets to a NFL game, the middle and myself tickets to see Cirque de Soleil and the second youngest a glider ride. It struck me how all of the above tapped the experience economy vein.

"Not one of us thought to give him a tie, sweater, golfclub etc...he has enough of those already.

"P.S. My mother didn't give him anything saying he's got me what more does he need.-God love her!"

The experience economy is already upon us, and Pine and Gilmore offer a number of very useful concepts for recognizing and understanding it. My comments on the book can be found in the Nowhere Confidential Archive section for June 2005. You can buy the book here:

The Experience Economy

THANKS, KYRSTEN!

Kyrsten, the bride in the Double Down wedding featured in an earlier report [now in the Nowhere Confidential Archive section, dated 2 April 2005] writes:

"hi Lloyd! i'm kyrsten, the bride you wrote about on your website.. eddie and i thought your review of our wedding rocked! it's amazing because when we threw the wedding together, i kept thinking about the people who would be there who didn't know us.. and i was hoping that they'd enjoy it and think it was sweet and humorous.. so the whole time i planned things, i kept thinking about how it would look from a stranger's perspective.. well, it looked exactly like i thought it would! thanks for coming to our wedding, getting drunk, and giving us our 15 minutes of internet fame.."

Of course, thanks are entirely due to Kyrsten and Eddie for throwing such a cool wedding bash in public and welcoming strangers to it.

Here's a link to the website for Eddie's band (The One and Only Typicals):

O. A. O. T's

CARRIE'S REPORT FROM MICHIGAN

"The Blow-Torch Penis"

A semi-humorous incident that happened to me at the airport when I was going through security -- maybe you'll think it's funny . . .

It didn't happen too long after I left the Blue Moon beer and the American Spirits at the Palms. I went to the hotel, packed and headed out. I was definitely still intoxicated at this point and could barely stand up, I was so exhausted. So I was traveling through the security line, minding my own business, when I was pulled aside by an authority figure. He kindly asked if he could check my bag, and I knew right then and there exactly what he was going to discover. A gigantic penis lighter I had bought for my roommate at a souvenir shop. I knew she was going to get a huge kick out of it. We have this sick cycle of buying each other perverted souvenirs. But anyway, I tried to warn the security man so he wouldn't be startled when he made the revelation, but I was past the point of speaking and well into sleep walking at that stage. I didn't know what to say, so I just let him make the discovery. He pulled out the brown paper bag, opened it up and reached in. When he pulled out the penis I wasn't really embarrassed, but much more amused. My cheeks felt a little flushed -- I probably looked awake for a couple seconds. The merchandise was then passed to another security man who didn't even try to hold back his laugh, and at this point I had mustered enough energy to let out my own little laugh. It was then passed through the machine, once again, and then on to a woman who seemed disgusted to be in the same vicinity as me and my penis lighter. She proclaimed that it had torch-like qualities. I said my final good-byes and it was ripped away from me forever. Just a great way to end my Vegas vacation, with a penis confiscation. One of those airport employees definitely has it in their possession as we speak.

It took me a good two whole days being home before I snapped into reality. Vegas definitely has a very strong force. It follows you home and you have to fight it off. After about two days of recuperation I headed to work. The minute I walked in, I was summoned over to a table of my regulars. Somehow, information had leaked all the way to Grand Rapids Michigan about my experience at the Ghost Bar (rolling on couches, falling under the table, being kicked out etc. . . .). I didn't even have a chance to tell anyone about my vacation, they knew all the highlights. They knew about me losing my cell phone, which, by the way, arrived in the mail yesterday. There must have been an inside source. I think my roommate who was home told someone who told someone else who went to Branns, my bar, and made the announcement: "Listen up, everyone, our fellow employee, friend, and bartendress seems to have made an ass of herself her first night there -- oh, yeah, she also lost her cell phone and was kicked out of a bar. Don't forget to give her shit as soon as she walks through those doors."

It wasn't a very busy night -- nothing too exciting happened. I balanced a bottle of vodka on my head for the three people sitting at the bar. Then I told them I used to be in the circus and left it at that.

Over the years I've developed this sense where I can guess what someone is going to drink, or order to eat. I had this man from Boston sit down -- he didn't stop talking the whole time he sat. At one point he was about to order his drink and I said, "White Russian," before he had the chance to get it out. I was right. I love it when that happens -- I feel like I have special powers. Actually it's just a bartender's intuition. Later on when he was about to order food I said, "Wait, you're going to order . . . wings." He said that wasn't what he wanted, asked a couple of food questions, then finally ordered wings. That's the only really cool thing that happened. I have to work for the next three nights -- hopefully it will be much busier.

NOT FADE AWAY

Cotty Chubb, maverick film producer, was recently wrangling a film shoot (or being wrangled by a film shoot) in a small town in New Mexico and wrote from the location:

"'Not Fade Away' was recorded here in Clovis, where yesterday I went to the actual studio, utterly unchanged -- from the microphones and guitars and acetate cutter, the massive and beautiful Hammond organ and its Leslie speakers with fans built in to make their eerie airy sound . . . down to the curtains in the little apartment in the back where Buddy slept when he came from Lubbock to record 'Peggy Sue' and the rest of his hits. A shrine, and vastly under-appreciated here."

[Lloyd adds: "Jack White needs to get in there, with Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney -- to run some new music through those dusty amps. What could be cooler?"]

A postscript:

Cotty Chubb has now finished wrangling (or being wrangled by) his film shoot in Clovis. The photographer William Eggleston visited him there and photographed the studio Cotty wrote about.

Cotty reports:

"Just perhaps as an addendum, I note that Bill Eggleston, who . . . spent three nights and two days in Clovis, and both days spent the most of his time in the 7th Street Studio, photographing, told me that I was wrong to have characterized the plain existence of this place where Buddy Holly recorded 'Not Fade Away' (which ought to be the Clovis theme song, and is not) as 'bizarre.'

"'It's not... "bizarre,' he said. 'It's a . . . miracle.'"

BOAT LAUNCH!

Elyssa East sends this report on a canoe launching, which I found oddly moving:

"As some of you know this past Sunday was my friend Josh's boat launch party. Josh, who I know from Reed, rebuilt a canoe that his parents bought each other as a wedding present thirty something years ago. The canoe, an original Old Town cedar hulled canoe, had been stored in a barn for about 20 years. A beam fell sometime ago and broke 17 of its ribs. (Josh's parents divorced in the early 1980s.) Joshua has spent the summer rebuilding the canoe, including re-wrapping the hull in canvas, replacing the ribs, resealing and refinishing the boat that he's renamed Proserpina, the Italian name for Persephone. The boat looked especially beautiful decked out in sparklers and flags for the launch. Josh is paddling it into New York City this week, a ninety-six mile trip which should be a challenge as the Hudson is a tidal river heavily trafficked by barges and power boaters and Josh's J-stroke looked especially rusty as he paddled away."

Earlier Elyssa wrote:

"Just yesterday I was writing in my journal about my own metaphorical road to nowhere. In fact, I specifically wrote about maps and feeling lost without certain plans to navigate a particular landscape in my life. At the same time, though, I was recognizing how much of the landscape I miss by following these plans and how ultimately, following the plan makes me more lost than striking out on my own."

A self-portrait by the wonderful painter Bella Baran, who lives in Israel and is a friend from the rec.music.dylan newsgroup.

On the 2004 9/11 anniversary she wrote a letter to friends in America:

Here it is, September 11 once again, and I'm thinking of all of you.

Israel television aired very detailed coverage, minute by minute of that day.

Again I felt that initial heartbreak, that my New York was no longer safe from the outside world, that the craziness of terror that I sort of chose to live with here in Jerusalem had so sadly reached my home town that I love.

But each year brings new reflection in the light of current events, and this year the images that stood out for me were those of New Yorkers, Americans, of all races and beliefs living together in one city, helping each other to run to safety, and embodying a rich mosaic of humanity that manage to live together without going to war against each other. SOMETHING WE TAKE TOTALLY FOR GRANTED.

Whether you are politically left, right or center, whether you see America as the greatest nation on earth, land of the free and home of the brave, or as a capitalist empire sucking the world dry while creating needless havoc in far away lands, these are some simple facts that come to mind seeing that terrible day again on TV.

In these countries that attack with terror, you can only live one way, be one thing - or be on the death list or black list. You can't be what you want to be, or tolerate those who are different. As a woman, YOU CAN BARELY BE AT ALL.

I think it's a very simple truth, that we tend to forget, caught within the maelstrom of rhetoric, argument and politics of today. It seems to me now - the most important thing to remember.

Jon & Mitch At Cannes

NEWS FROM THE MIGHTY MI - MITCH LEVINE!

Former film festival directors Jon Fitzgerald and Mitch Levine have launched Festival Consulting Group, which will help film festivals with sponsorship, strategic planning, production services and other needs. Former Warner Bros. acquisitions executive John Halecky and marketing/fundraising veteran Cindy Green will also join the company. Levine, also a film director, is the former executive director and CEO of the Palm Springs International Film Festivals; he continues to serve as production director of the IFP/Los Angeles Film Festival. Fitzgerald was previously the executive director of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and VP of programming at IFILM as well as festival director for AFI and the executive director of the Slamdance Film Festival. He will continue to oversee Right Angle Studios.
Edit

Click Here To Check Out Their Web Site:

Festival Consulting Group

JUNIPER'S SISTER & NIECE -- JUICED!

[John Lettiere is a friend from the Bob Dylan newsgroup rec.music.dylan. Last year we discovered that we were both Civil War fanatics and obsessive collectors of books on that subject. Like me, John first got interested in the Civil War through the works of Bruce Catton -- he writes here about how he got his copy of "Battles and Leaders Of the Civil War", a four-volume series of collected articles about the war by participants, published some years after the conflict ended:]

7 May 2004

Let me tell you a story on how I acquired them:

I am a book fiend.

Back in the late 60s, me and a friend would visit book row down in the East Village a few times a month.

I loved those old book stores, with their old musty shelves, bins and boxes of old used books. We'd spend the whole day looking, it was like an adventure. Now the only thing left is the "Strand."

Some days we'd find nothing, and then there were days where we cleaned up, and brought back bags of old books, comics and magazines.

And some times finding that one gem of a book in all those piles, WOW! Like a copy of Men And Things I Saw in the Civil War by Gen. James F. Rusling (1914) for 2 bucks.

Here's a link to an online copy:

"Men and Things I Saw In Civil War Days"

Anyway I digress;

I was on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx one night, and stopped off at a local book store as was usual. In those days I could never go past a book store without browsing its wares.

Killed, I don't know how many thousands of hours doing that.

Anyway, I was going through their discount bins, and what do I see? "Battles and Leaders", all four volumes.

I couldn't believe my fucking luck. Only thing was they cost 20 bucks plus tax, and all I had on me was 9.

I was with a friend at the time, and asked him to lend me the balance till I got home, not more that 15 minutes by bus from where the store was. But the prick refused.

I was so pissed I almost strangled the bastard. After I finally calmed down, I tried to reason with him, but no, he wasn't gonna budge.

Now what the fuck am I gonna do? I knew I wasn't leaving that fucking store without those books.

So now I go to a candy store around the corner that we'd frequented, run by two nut jobs, Pete and Larry.

I went in to buy a pack of cigarettes, and an egg cream, and make a phone call home to see if one of my sisters could bring me some money to buy the books.

Spoke to my mom to explain the situation, but neither of them were home.

Now here's the freaky thing -- Larry one of the owners overhears the conversation and says: hey don't sweat it, I'll lend you the money. You could've flattened me with a feather off J.E.B Stuart's hat.

As it turned out both Pete and Larry were Civil War re-enactors.

Who would've guessed?

We knew these guy as only candy store owners, where we'd go in buy cigs and a soda and bullshit baseball, football, and hockey.

Anyway, they didn't have such a high opinion of Catton. Not that they knocked him, but as Larry told me: there's a lot of other books that were better. Needless to say I got the books and a whole lot more because of these two candy store guys.

[I'm guessing that the edition John found is the same one I found in a New York City used bookstore when I was in my twenties -- a reprint from the 1950s, illustrated below:]

MAYA'S REPORT FROM NOWHERE

[Maya Allison reports on her trip to Nowhere, courtesy of anaesthesia administered for some tooth surgery:]

Okay, you asked.

Funny that you should compare it to being nowhere, because it was just that. I remember thinking "this is odd, I'm awake" throughout the surgery. But I can't remember any of the actual surgery, and I can deduce now that I wasn't actually "awake" in the conscious sense. They gave me some kind of drug cocktail, combining a sedative with an amnesia-inducing drug. This is the second time I've gone under in this way, and unlike a general anesthesia, which I've had once, it doesn't feel like disappearing into blackness with a thud. It feels instead like... well, kind of like being in a parallel plane. I felt like I was there, and like I was seeing everything and everyone, but not comprehending and not interacting, and very, very at peace.

With no distinctions between awake and asleep, consciousness seeped back in a way that felt like those early moments waking from a deep sleep, when you don't know exactly who you are yet, or what is real. This state slowly dissipated over the course of the evening after the surgery.

The feeling of being "awake" became relative. Each new layer of fog that lifted I thought to myself, "oh, I was not as awake as I thought I was an hour ago." And even this morning, I woke up wondering if I was really "all there" last night, though I acted fairly normal.

The most embarrassing part, in my memory, was in the beginning of returning to my body. The nurse was puttering around me, and she asked me about the French investment bank where I worked. She was just testing my memory skills, but I embarked on a long analysis of the style and social behavior of French bankers versus American bankers, noting that the French bankers are really just as macho as the American bankers, but they have a different language of masculinity that doesn't translate to American. For this reason, the gay men I work with are always speculating as to which bankers are gay and which aren't. Meanwhile, the nurse was chuckling and encouraging me with "Oh really, very interesting." I didn't need much encouragement though. I was giddy. It's a lot like remembering a drunken conversation with some embarrassment and regret. I also developed a mood to match a serious hangover last night.

More than once in the 24 hours I've been waking up from surgery, I thought of the Buddhist comparison of enlightenment to a "great awakening" -- one monk compared it to realizing one day that you had been looking at your toes for your entire life, and when you look up you laugh with joy and wonder to see the expanse of everything you missed, and cry at the tragedy in this same fact.

I keep wondering, NOW am I awake? Is this as awake as I ever was? I want to be more awake, and more awake and more awake. It's not so fun living with "Maya" -- the illusion of reality. So much is lost.

But I have to say I'm glad I lost the memory of the oral surgery -- judging from the stitches I woke up with, ignorance on that front is bliss.

Ha.

PICTURES FROM TUMULTY!

Above -- Tumulty's actual dog! His name is Hero but clearly he lives like an oriental potentate!

Above and below -- drawings from Tumulty's own hand! Startling new insights into the Internet prankster's out-of-control psyche!

PUPPETS & MASKS

[Ghostly Girl, a friend from the silent film newsgroup alt.movies.silent, is a puppeteer and mask maker. She sends the above image of her work and writes:]

. . . the jester is soft sculpture from recycled ladies pantyhose and the others are from a toilet tissue mache thing I thought up after watching a video on a Japanse Doll artist who was a Living Treasure in Japan. I took the same method used with the handmade papers in Japan and transferred them to glue and water with toilet paper! The full effect is a very lifelike skin surface up close. There is recycled styrofoam as the "bones" underneath to which the paper is applied. The bodies are all cloth and everything was hand sewn...

The Jester is a Marionette and the "landlord "puppet (yes based on a landlord I had and felt the need to stick pins in when he was being a jerk) is a hand puppet...

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