26 May 2004

Friday I was at an all-day meeting near San Francisco. Interesting people, interesting conversation.

Sergey Brin and Mitch Kapor discussing Mozilla.

Friday night Mike Shaver, Chris Toshok and myself went to the DNA Lounge, where Jamie and Angela assiduously plied us with sugary inebriants. I ended up missing my 8am return flight, and decided to spend Saturday wandering around San Francisco.

Mid-afternoon found me at 826 Valencia, Dave Eggers’s writing workshop for students ages 8-18. I saw Stephen Elliott there and bought his latest book, Happy Baby. 826 Valencia is a bit unusual; the space is zoned for retail, and the proprietors are required to offer something for sale to people who wander in off the street, though the back 80% of the store is filled with tables and computers used for teaching and writing.

To meet the zoning requirements, they’ve turned the front into a “pirate store,” where eye patches, jolly roger flags and poison rings are offered for sale, and where one can barter for pure lard by the pound. It’s not clear what pirates use lard for, but it’s there. For public health reasons, they’re not allowed to sell the lard, and hence the bartering arrangement.

Of course, books are also sold.

In 826 Valencia.

I was planning on taking the redeye back to Boston, but then I remembered that my friend Jimmy was in LA, and suddenly the idea of sitting in an airplane all night Saturday night struck me as pretty unappealing. So I flew to LA.

Jimmy picking me up at LAX.

Jimmy and his friend Rory are Caltech alums, and my friend Rony is dating a Caltech girl, so we headed over to campus in Pasadena to check out the party that they were throwing.

We were tired and not really in a party mood, so after an hour we decided to walk the campus a bit. Caltech is gorgeous and very SoCal: clay-tiled roofs, unclear distinctions between indoor and outdoor space, scattered palm trees, etc. The hallways, however, were pretty familiar to anyone who’s spent time at MIT.

In a Caltech dorm.

Sunday we drove to Venice Beach for empanadas and to take pictures of the daily freakshow that is the VB boardwalk.

Star-of-David balloon art.

Jimmy introduced me to empanadas in Argentina, when we were exploring Buenos Aires in December. They were delicious.

From the beach we rushed to Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for a post-prandial movie. We saw Troy, and Jamie’s observation — that the movie portrayed the Trojan War as taking place in about three weeks instead of the ten years it actually took — was irking me the whole time. Overall, a pretty good movie. Not sure I would have spent $170 million making it though.

After the movie, we ate polish food at an awesome restaurant called Polka, and then I watched Jimmy and Rory hackey-sack in the parking lot before catching my flight home.

I can’t remember any time in my life when an ordinary two-day weekend has felt so incredibly long. Graham Greene’s book, Travels with my Aunt, ends with a story about a man who learns he has only 30 days left to live. He knows that he cannot lengthen his life and so he devises a strategy to make it feel longer. Too sick to travel, he pools his wealth and rents an enormous mansion in Italy for a month. Every night, he sleeps in a different bedroom, sometimes dragging himself from room to room down the hallway by his arms, so weak is he that he cannot walk. The constantly-changing surroundings keep his mind stimulated and on the final day, he dies a happy man.

Back in Boston.

If you want to make your weekend last, keep changing cities.

In other news, the collapse of the new airport terminal in Paris has struck me as a personal tragedy. Such a beautiful building, now partially crumbled and perhaps doomed to being razed. Last month I wrote this in my diary:

The new terminal 2 at charles de gaulle airport in Paris is an extraordinary building. It is modern without being stark. It is vast and grand, white and clean, and somehow it gives hope that out of this culture there can come good. It seems to spring not from the mind of a great architect but from the best parts of a society that sees a humane future in a world of technology and quantity.

An architect in Cambridge, Brad Bellows, is quoted as saying: “We don’t want to purge the world of future Golden Gate bridges, Notre-Dame cathedrals, and Concordes. It should not be lost in the aftermath of its failure that Terminal 2E was a gorgeous piece of work.”

Hear, hear.

Me in Terminal 2E of Charles de Gaulle in October of 2003.

Terminal 2E today.