Yes, clients occasionally put me up in fancy-pants hotels (where amenities include loaner laptops and goldfish) for press briefings.
Yes, clients occasionally take me out to dinner in fancy-pants restaurants.
No, this hasn’t stopped me from hitting a halal street-meat cart for lamb & chicken rice platter.
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Best line from the press briefings: When asked about about the rigorous process his company has for suppliers of chemical ingredients, one of the VPs told us, “One supplier sent us the chemicals in a cut-off sweatshirt sleeve.”
Evidently, the supplier didn’t want to bother filling out proper certificates or taking care of traceability requirements, so they just . . . wrapped the chemicals in a cut-off sweatshirt sleeve and shipped ’em off to a global provider.
“The supplier was based in an, um, evolving economy,” we were told.
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Here’s a picture from the staircase in the restaurant:
And here’s a picture of Greene St., running north of Canal:
Early in “Spook Country,” Gibson introduces Tito by locating him in a restaurant “on Canal Street” in an unspecified American city. Am I in trouble for initially concluding that Gibson was referring to New Orleans?
Boy, that would make the rest of Tito’s scenes a lot different. I mean, as someone who spends time in NYC, all those scenes and locales were pretty clear to me.
But I’ve never been to LA, so I have to assume that all those scenes with Hollis had some verisimilitude.
I’ve never been to most of the places Gibson’s stories go, so there’s always a degree of faith involved.
I’ve had breakfast at Beenie’s Cafe, however, and Gibson is spot on.
That’s not the place with the 12-egg omelet, right? My buddy Tom once ordered the 6-egg omelet there, explaining to me and Fink, “It’s twice as healthy as the 12-egg version.”
That’s Beth’s, at which breakfast is the least appropriate time to dine.
Now that you bring up Hollis in LA, I remember finding Gibson’s description of the ineffable LA dawn to be very labored and wondering if the old man had shot his bolt. I’m no longer wondering that, but the jury’s still out on whether he can manage to write about characters who have any degree of luxury than, say, Tito who don’t also suffer an epistemological crisis whenever, say, the sun rises. Unless Gibson’s point is that they can’t.
That’s a neat question about Gibson & luxury! I think he actually addresses it in Spook Country, in that scene where Milgrom is on a private jet. Milgrom muses about the experience of a level of wealth that everyday people can’t even conceive of, fixating (as I recall it, during a flight to Italy) on that disconnection with everyday people.
Gibson seems to regard it as an utterly unnatural state, one that’s in contrast to the flow of Tito and his “systema.”
I just caught up with Gibson last year, and while everyone has been remarking on his giving up “futuristic” writing, I’ve been reminded that a major theme of his has always been the interaction of people who live very close to and by their systema and people so fabulously wealthy and powerful that they no longer trust their systema. What’s changed is that upper bound of godhood has come down from orbital artificial intelligences to Hubertus Bigend, and so the gradations are finer. Hollis is a middling character, with her street cred and networks of contacts, and it seemed to me that Gibson couldn’t decide how much to let her trust her systema, and this came through in his artless description of that LA morning. The next critical essay collection should be titled, “All Yesterday’s Hotel Lobbies.”
What hasn’t changed is Gibson’s weird idea of what art is; from AI-assembled bricolage to chrono-spatial palimpsests that require embarrassing goggles, he seems to be trapped in the 1980’s.
To me, it’s less that he gave up on “futuristic” writing and more that the future caught up with him. I remember writing a piece about that subject, in relation to a DVD documentary about Gibson (No Maps for These Territories), but I can’t find it anywhere on my site. At the time, I remember marveling over how impossible today is to anyone in 1999.
I had the same feeling last year when reading Ahmed Rashid’s book on the Taliban, which came out in early 2001. The world that it described was one where oil hovered around $15/barrel, and thus its view of Russia, Iran, and, well, everywhere else was utterly dated. It’s not a sign that Rashid wasn’t perceptive enough to see where the world was going; it’s more a sign of just how unpredictable unpredictable can be.
But getting back to Gibson, I really need to go back and reread Pattern Recognition, which I detested when it first came out.