Ever watched a trade show come apart? The big bash for watchmaking is Baselworld, where the top-line exhibitors spend around $50m to put together a booth so that jewelers can ooh and aah. Unfortunately for Baselworld, Basel has gotten a reputation of printing up special menus with inflated prices for when Baselworld is in town, the hotels all push their rates through the roof and the company that puts on the tradeshow just bought a $350m building and people were starting to get cranky. Whelp, Monday the Swatch Group pulled out. Richemont's been gone since 1990; they started an alternative tradeshow. The MCH Group, which runs the show, had their stock tank yesterday. Now the retailers are starting to demand boons. Gonna be interesting for a tiny segment of the world, but the contagion has spread to CNBC and Forbes. Talkin' a $28bln industry which, I think, is about 1/4th the amount of value Facebook lost last Thursday. See, talking about this means I don't have to talk about how much I hate LA.
When I was working for the stone company, they had a quarry just north of Atlanta. A young 20-something engineer from Montreal was working there and it was a sweet gig. Super well paid, interesting work, and he got a hefty relocation package too. But he was miserable, saying he can't manage to make any friends. He was really nice too, when I was down there we'd go hang out and eat out after work and it was always a blast. The only friends he managed to make were a couple middle aged men he was going golfing with every other week. He tried dating too, but he said the fact he didn't go to church was a massive deal breaker for many girls down there So what he ended up doing was not taking ANY vacation and instead getting a friday off every other week. He was flying to Montreal for the weekend all the time. But by the time I finished my photography contract he had quit and was moving back home to Montreal, after only about 9 months in Atlanta. I had some fun times there at Ponce city market, and trying out different restaurants. But I probably would hate living there.
He gave one explanation. There are so many others. - White Flight, as explained by Howard Zinn. The "Valley" of LA exists because of school integration and the fact that privileged white folx didn't want their babies going to school with those horrible brown and black kids, thus creating a geographically as well as economically divided metroplex. - the Street Car Conspiracy, as explained by nearly everyone. LA is a spread out heinous shithole because Firestone, General Motors, Standard Oil and Mack all worked hand-in-hand behind the scenes to annihilate public transit in the areas that needed it most. - Frank Lloyd Wright - Joan DidionTip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.