Category: Big Business

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Weakly – May 5: “Jumpin’ with my boy Sid in the city”

[This is the third in a series of long-ass rambling posts about my travels in Chicago and Toronto from May 3-9. Part 1 is over here and part 2 is over there.]

Before heading over to the McCormick Center for the second day of BIO, I made plans for dinner with my old pal Sid. We’d gone to the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College around the same time (I was 1993-95, and he was 1994-96). He’d seen my White Sox post on Monday (oh, and I forgot to mention: The national anthem at that game? That was sung by The Maytag Repair Man) and dropped me a line. We hadn’t seen each other in 15 years, so I was looking forward to catching up. I’ve been working pretty hard lately at not Doing All The Talking; I wondered how that would work out.

Meanwhile, if it’s Wednesday, then this must be Singapore! I had a 10 a.m. appointment with the Singapore delegation, which wanted to talk about the city-state’s biomedical initiatives and how I might be able to develop some good articles about the place. The three Singaporean representatives talked for a bit about the history of their home, the generational trends — founding generation was concerned with survival, second generation with building a middle class, third generation with entrepreneurialism — and the importance of moving from services to innovation. We were later joined by an American who was working for the group, and he gave me some western perspective on the business and social atmosphere. “You can get a green card there in two weeks! I’m not kidding!” he told me.

When the PR people for Singapore first contacted me six weeks ago, I had to do my standard check on far eastern countries that want publicity: do they hate Israel? A few years ago, I wrote about how Malaysia wanted to meet with me at BIO, and how that country’s stance against Israel — as in, it doesn’t and shouldn’t exist — put them on my “no fly” list. Singapore, it turns out, was quite the opposite; Israel was one of the first countries to recognize its independence, and the IDF may have helped Singapore build its army.

The conversation went well, concluding with an open-ended invitation to visit (on their dime, I think). I’m sure any such visit would end in my making an inadvertent transgression that leads to a judicial caning, but we’ll see.

From there, I hustled over to one of our advertisers. They had a new marketing team in place and wanted to talk with me about the state of their industry and their company’s place within it. That was an interesting conversation, because I thought the company had engaged in a flawed expansion strategy in the early part of the decade. It had gone through awful struggles based on one major acquisition gone wrong (c.2004), but even before that, I suspected the company was a house of cards.

We bickered a bit on disproving a negative — would the company have fallen into trouble without that big acquisition? — then moved on to the question about the viability of trade shows. Neither the new marketing director nor I knew if it made sense for companies like his to attend big trade shows (like BIO) anymore. For the past few years, we’d all seen attendance drop at the major events, and I’m convinced it’s only partly because of the economic slowdown. Companies exhibit at these shows to meet leads and try to develop new business, as well as to catch up with existing clients, keep up a presence, and otherwise keep abreast of industry happenings.

Some argue that, even though attendance at the major shows is down, but that the quality of the attendees is up. That is, the people who are attending are the real decision-makers, so you’re getting your money’s worth out of exhibiting. Others disagree and have withdrawn from a few major trade shows in recent years, which can have a domino effect: “If [X] isn’t there, then it must not be a major event anymore, and we shouldn’t be there either.”

I’m lucky, inasmuch as my presence at trade shows is for not-directly-commercial purposes. I’m there to make contacts, trade info, get story ideas, and keep up with our advertisers. Whenever anyone asks me, “How’s the show going?”, I tell them, “I’m not selling anything, so it’s going just fine!” Of course, we’re all selling something.

But it raises the question of where these contract service providers are supposed to make new leads, if not at trade shows. Print and online advertising are important, but the serendipity of an attendee walking by a booth and realizing, “Hmm, [company x] may be able to handle that assignment we need done,” is irreplaceable. At our own annual show, a much smaller affair than these multi-thousand attendee events (we have 140 exhibitors and around 350-400 attendees, depending on how good a lineup of speakers I come up with), we’ve had exhibitors tell us, “I wish we could pull out of [major show x] and just exhibit at your event. We get more leads here in one day than we do in three days there.”

So companies are re-assessing where they’ll exhibit and which shows deliver the attendee base they’re looking for, since attendance is suffering everywhere. More to the point, they’re trying to develop new models for how they make connections.

Which brings me to my evening with Sid.

I caught the shuttle back from BIO around 5:30 (no Uganda Limited this time), cleaned up, and went for a walk around the neighborhood. There was a used bookstore nearby, so I stopped in to, well, walk around a used bookstore. You know what I’m like.

I was hoping to find a present for Sid on the shelves, but they didn’t have any of my faves on hand. So I headed back to the lobby of my hotel, read Robert Mitchum’s biography on the Kindle app on my phone, and waited for my pal.

A few months ago, Sid’s Facebook status mentioned that he was staying in a hotel about 15 miles from my house in NJ for a corporate event. He was busy the whole time, so we couldn’t meet up. I was left to ponder what sort of company books national events in suburban NJ, only 10 miles away from New York. A quick look at his FB profile before our dinner in Chicago, and I discovered that he worked for a wine company that’s based in Fair Lawn, NJ: question answered.

So, about Sid: when we met at St. John’s, I thought he was older than me (I was 23-24). He worked as a cook at Harry Brown’s, a bar & grill in town, and it seemed like a more grown-up job than my gig as a GED/literacy teacher for state highway workers. Also, Sid was pals with another new grad student, Miguel, who was 8 or 9 years older than me. It turns out that he was a year younger than me, graduating college in 1994. He felt like a contemporary this time around, esp. since we’re both recently(ish) married, no kids, and too smart for our own good.

This is what we looked like in 1995, when we went to Miguel’s wedding. Sid’s the guy in the middle. In my memory, the guy on the right looks like Tim Kazurinsky. Now I realize he was actually Mark Mothersbaugh. I’m the guy who looks like he has AIDS:

elsid.jpg

Sid’s job means he’s in deep with the booze & hospitality biz, I think. At least, I assume that’s why the manager of the hip restaurant he took us to came over to say hello and shoot the breeze for a bit. We tripled down on tuna dishes for appetizers and entrees, then spent dinner catching up on the past 15 years, trading stories about our hometowns (it turns out his little Pennsylvania town has an analog to my town’s Jackson-Whites), lamenting the lack of St. John’s-style conversation in our lives, explaining our jobs, and not explicitly wondering how we got here. Oh, and in a wonder of retcon, it turned out that he went to college with my sister-in-law as well as the daughter of Chip Delany, one of the authors I used to publish. Small world.

I was burned out from the day at BIO, and my Hendrick’s & tonic got to me a little early. In addition, we were eating on a sidewalk patio, and the dropping temps and breeze made me a lilttle shuddery and headachey. I was hoping it didn’t show, and it did help me with my Not Doing All The Talking.

That said, I really enjoyed the conversation that evening. It was good to get away from BIO for a bit, even if my coworkers were disappointed that I didn’t join them for dinner that night (they hadn’t told me about any dinner plans until I mentioned that I was going out with an old pal; we don’t always disseminate information well, which is sad inasmuch as it’s only a four-person team). I was happy to hear someone’s stories and just talk about our lives and our respective mid-life crises. I’m not going to go into depth recounting everything, because so much of it was just an easy back-and-forth between a couple of guys closing in on 40, with no need to impress each other. I haven’t even described what he looks like now, I realize. Here you go: big white guy (not fat, particularly), shaved head, goatee, wearing a brown seersucker jacket with a light plaid shirt underneath. At first I was concerned at the conflicting patterns, but they grew on me as the evening progressed.

As we finished our ahi burgers, Sid asked, “You wanna have one more G&T and then get a drink at this place I know?”

The equation flashed through my head:

2 G&Ts at dinner

+

1 more drink at a lounge/speakeasy/den of iniquity (at a minimum)

=

blown-out hangover the next day.

“Sure!” I said, thinking about how horrible Thursday’s flight home (and possibly Friday’s flight to Toronto) would be. But seriously, I don’t have a drinking problem.

We talked more as I polished off my Hendrick’s. He was embarrassed when I asked him what he’s been reading. I realized that Sid reads this blog and my literary ramblings probably make it sound like I’m always reading snooty-ass highbrow books. I assured him that Robert Mitchum’s bio wasn’t exactly St. John’s fare, and that most of the fun/light stuff I read is online, not in book form, so it doesn’t always make it onto the blog.

He told me he was reading Bill Bryson lately, about whom I’ve heard good stuff. Yet another author on my list. Sigh.

Over my protests, Sid took the bill for the meal, and took me on to The Drawing Room, a gorgeous underground lounge in the Gold Coast neighborhood. During our walk from the car to the lounge (Sid had only had a single beer over dinner), he regaled me with stories of municipal corruption in Chicago. I countered with, “In Bloomberg’s New York, any of his moneyed pals can build anything they want . . . except for a new building at Ground Zero, where no one can make any progress!”

We were seated at a corner to each other, with a square pillar between us, so that we both had to sit at an angle to see/talk to each other. Must be why they call it “hip.”

When I mentioned that Sid reads this blog, I should have pointed out that he pays particular attention to my gin-related posts, like Geneva Conventional a few weeks ago. In fact, he apologized at dinner that the restaurant didn’t serve my snooty Q-Tonic.

Our waiter brought over drink menus, and I asked what gins they had available. He named several of my high-end faves, then mentioned a local one called North Shore, which Sid had mentioned to me earlier in the evening. I asked what tonic they served.

“We make our own tonic in house,” the waiter said.

I nodded slowly. I could feel Sid’s grin through the pillar. “Uh-huh. I’ll have a North Shore and tonic, please.”

Sid, valiantly drinking lightly in order to not DWI, said under his breath, “champagnecocktailforme.”

The waiter walked off and, despite my pounding headache and slight nausea, I asked Sid, “You sure you don’t want a cranberry juice with that, you pussy?”

And it was back to old times, except I’m more fun now than I was then, or so I like to believe. He regaled me with stories about our pal Miguel, and their hijinks at work and in class. The waiter returned with our drinks, which were accompanied by a pair of narrow, frosted shot glasses. “The bartender would like to offer you a complementary Aviation,” he told us, gesturing at the shots.

I’d wanted to try one of these for a while, thanks to my wife’s pal Claudia, who loves the things. The problem is, two of the ingredients — maraschino liqueur and creme de violette — would never find any use in our house, and we’d be stuck buying two $25+ bottles for a single drink, so I’d never tried one.

I sampled (drank) the Aviation and concluded that we could probably stand to have more maraschino and violette in our diets.

Then I turned my attention to the gin & tonic. “No lime?” I said to Sid.

“It doesn’t need it.”

I held the glass below my nose and inhaled, trying to parse some of the botanicals. Its yellow tint implied saffron, but there was a weird spice-mix below the dominant juniper notes that added to the mystery. Good to know that, even headache-wracked, I could try to bring a discriminating palette to my booze.

I took a draw from the glass, eyes closed. “. . . Cinnamon?” I said

“Isn’t it great?” Sid asked.

“This may be the greatest G&T I’ve ever had,” I told him.

Hangover be damned. I marveled over the subtle warmth of the gin, how superior it was to the chilly florals and cucumber notes in the Hendrick’s I’d drunk an hour earlier. My only regret was that I would associate this drink with That BIO Show Where I Was Totally Wrecked On The Last Day. (Like that Interphex in 2005, except without the blackout.)

After the drink, we headed out. Sid was a good sport about my maunderings; I think I belabored the point about how he should get down to Decatur to visit our friends Miguel & Joy, because you never know what’s going to happen in this world. At some point, I asked him if he’s happy, which is something I like to ask old pals when we catch up. Not out of any preciosity, but just to find out how they’re doing in the all-important happiness scale. He said, “I’m around 85%. That sounds about right.”

On the drive back to my hotel, Sid mentioned a post I’d linked to a while back, about an Archie comic where Jughead becomes a punk-rocker. He told me that he and his brother were huge comic readers in their youth, and he remembered that issue backward and forward. Again, it struck me as funny that the Sid I knew at St. John’s was That Older Guy Who Works At The Bar, but in reality we were awfully similar people, except that it, um, never occurred to me to get a real job in order to be able to afford things. Outside of that, we were more alike than I imagined, right down to our shared affinity for Ambush Bug.

Sid dropped me at the corner and I made him promise that next time his company brought him out to Fair Lawn, he would spare some time to have a meal at our place, meet the wife and doggies, and otherwise let me reciprocate his hospitality.

As he drove away, I looked at the entrance of my hotel, teetered on the sidewalk, and decided to cross the street and hit up Walgreen’s for some Gatorade and ibuprofen. It was my hangover remedy at St. John’s and, while I was likely too far gone for it to matter, I decided to give it a shot for old time’s sake.

Back in my room, it occurred to me that meeting up with Sid was of a piece with the earlier conversation about trade shows. Sure, we were lucky that we’d managed to cross paths, but we also had the infrastructure in place to “make our own luck,” in the form of Facebook. Without it, this reunion wouldn’t have happened.

Just around midnight, I finished off the last of the 20-oz. Gatorade, turned out the lights, and went to bed.

Next: The Miracle

May 3: Bloodshot Eye of the Tiger

May 4: Skokie, the Germans, and the Lost Ugandan

May 5: “Jumpin’ with my boy Sid in the city”

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Weakly – May 4: Skokie, the Germans, and the Lost Ugandan

[This is the second in a series of long-ass rambling posts about my travels from May 3-9. Part 1 is over here.]

I woke up earlyish on Tuesday (6:30 a.m. constitutes ‘sleeping in’ for me), took care of a little work, ironed my suits and shirts, and made an early start to the convention center. Even though I had setup duty, and even though it would turn out that I was the only one of my four-person contingent who booked a return flight late enough to actually cover the end of the show on Thursday (someone has to be on site to turn in the paperwork, pack up the booth and miscellany, and otherwise keep the place covered), I still felt compelled to get to the exhibit hall a little early on BIO opening day, get the magazines and subscription forms out, and scope out the environs.

It wasn’t going to be a short work-day. The exhibit hall was open from 10:00-4:30, with an in-hall hospitality reception going on till 6:30, but I had a big date ahead of me that night. With Germans. In Skokie. (Make your own ACLU joke here.)

I took the sponsored shuttle bus to the McCormick Center. One of my advertiser-pals turned out to be staying in my hotel and boarded the shuttle ahead of me. We shot the breeze during the ride, but his accent — he’s from the company that flew me out to Belfast for a press event two years ago — always makes him a little tough for me to follow.

I didn’t really get a chance to look around during Monday’s cab-rides and airport shuttle adventure, so I occasionally took my eyes off of Philip’s mouth — sometimes it’s the only clue as to what he’s saying! — and gazed at the scenery. I always liked Chicago’s architecture, at least around the Loop. Even the big buildings don’t feel like they’re bearing down on you, the way they do in NYC. Out by the convention center, the buildings aren’t so good. There are a bunch of apartments and condos that look like they’re deliberately quirky, an attempt at attracting hip people with money or something. Some were truly ghastly industrial nightmares, with acid-etched aluminum facades. Or maybe they were just run down and this was a bad neighborhood to be in. On the upside, there’s a special route for buses to get to McCormick, so we got a different view than the standard cab-route (part of it was underground, which was a plus).

On the way into the convention center, the bus passed some protestors. Now, protesting the BIO meeting is a long-standing tradition. At the first BIO I attended (Boston, 2000), a squad of butterfly-people-on-stilts shouted at attendees about genetically modified seeds. Those GM guys were a mainstay, outnumbering the “drugs are too expensive and/or too dangerous” crowd, as well as the batshit-crazy animal-rights protesters.

In San Francisco a few years ago, where they have a professional protesting class, there were a lot of black ski-mask types, people who would dive on the street in front of the shuttle buses or shout your name on their bullhorns (we wear name badges; one of the big hassles of trade shows is remembering to take off your badge when you leave for the evening. Otherwise, strangers address you by name while you walk down the sidewalk, sorta the opposite of that great song by The National). Sadly, a year later in Philadelphia, a cop had a fatal heart attack while scuffling with some protesters. Given the city, my money was on at least a couple hippies suffering unfortunate injuries.

The big joke about the GM food protesters is that agricultural biotech is actually a pretty small part of the BIO meeting. It’s too low margin, relative to biologic drugs. But nobody expects butterfly-stilt people to have much business sense.

This year, the only protesters I saw were a gaggle of 9/11 Truthers. “That’s odd,” I thought. “They must’ve taken a left turn at Albuquerque.”

As I walked down our aisle of the hall, I noticed a couple of uniformed guys standing by our booth. I hoped that they were just taking a break from patrolling around the hall, but as I got closer, I saw that they had pulled our fiberglass display cases out from behind the popup display.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Is this your booth?”

“Yeah.”

“You can’t keep these cases behind your display,” said the policeman.

“Why not?”

“It’s a fire hazard,” said the fireman.

“And a security risk,” said the policeman.

“They’re . . .  just empty cases,” I said. They’d already removed the tops.

“We’ve got two former presidents here this morning. If you can’t get these cases under that table, we’re going to have to take them,” one said.

It wasn’t quite a non sequitur, but I could see where they were coming from. Obviously, there was intel about a plot to kidnap Presidents Clinton and Bush, stuff them in orange fiberglass shipping containers, and send them to Ramsey, NJ. Or they were taking our new promotional T-shirts — “Contract Pharma: We’re The Bomb!” — literally. I was hoping they didn’t find the box-cutter we keep in our meeting-miscellany bag.

I moved the boxes of magazines out from under the table, put the cases there, and put some magazines out on the table. The men in uniform were satisfied and meandered along. At least the presence of the Truthers made sense.

I had no appointments scheduled for the first day of the show, so I strolled around the exhibit hall and stopped in on various advertisers and other acquaintances. The hall at BIO is dominated by regional economic development groups — the show was once described to me as “a singles bar for governors and venture capitalists” — so there’s plenty of regional fare. The Louisiana pavilion, for example, was serving king cake and chickory coffee. The Canadian pavilion brought Tim Horton’s coffee, but no pastries this year. A few years ago (Boston, 2007), the Nebraska pavilion had staffers grilling steaks for much of the show. It was about 15 feet away from our booth and smelled awesome for a little while.

I tend to run on a different metabolism at conferences. Most daytime meals tend to be pastries and/or chocolate, and I drink smaller amounts of coffee more often than I do during a normal day. The result of the constant walking, conversing and low-intensity snacking is the realization that I’ve just gone 8 hours without a pee-break. What I’m saying is, it’s a very different rhythm, being at a show.

I had some good conversations over the course of the day, picking up industry gossip and getting a feel for the tenor of — and expectations for — the conference. (More on that in the next post.) During my time at the booth, I was happy to get some praise for the magazine and my wacky editorials. I know that this blog is where I get to have fun, but it’s gratifying to have people who aren’t already my friends tell me how much they enjoy my writing.

And then there was Skokie.

A month or two before BIO, the PR agency for Vetter, a contract manufacturer based in Germany, told me that they wanted to host a press event at their new clinical development facility in Skokie. They asked me what day I thought would be best for it. I advised against Tuesday, since that was the day of the hospitality reception, and it’s my tradition to drink too much wine at the Australia and New Zealand pavilions. Sadly, they scheduled it for Tuesday, and it was set to run from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., which meant that my work day was going to run more than 12 hours.

I neglected to print out my confirmation e-mail from them before leaving for Chicago, so I stopped by the company’s booth to see where we were meeting. Peter, one of the executives, told me, “We’ll meet downstairs between the two buildings and leave at 5.” He said that someone would be holding the red “lollipop” sign with the company’s name.

“‘Downstairs between the two buildings’?” I thought. “Well, Peter’s German, and they’re not known for verbal ambiguity, so it must be a glaringly obvious location.”

I talked with attendees and exhibitors at my booth till around 4:45, then packed up my things and hurried downstairs. Between the two buildings.

There was, of course, no sign of anyone from the company, no special shuttlebus, and no red lollipop.

I scurried around between the north and south buildings, between the south building and the adjacent hotel, between the devil and the deep blue sea. By then, it was 5:05. It didn’t take any great familiarity with Germans to know that the shuttle was going to leave at 5:00 on the nose.

I went back up to the company’s booth, and found only one representative, an older American employee. I told him that I’d missed the shuttle and he basically gave me a “what do you want me to do about it?” look. So I took a walk, met up with more of my pals, and felt bad that I’d missed the event.

It’s not that I was pining to take a tour through an unfinished clinical development vial-filling facility, but I try to make good on my obligations, and I worried that if they had a small turnout, my absence would be conspicuous.

Around 5:45, I stopped by their booth again, to leave an apology note. This time, three younger staffers were present. The first one I spoke to, a German man, stared at me as though he didn’t speak english when I tried to describe how I’d missed the bus. Then one of the Americans heard me, and she said, “Wait, you’re supposed to be at the Skokie event?”

“Yeah, but Peter’s directions were for shit. ‘Downstairs between the two buildings,'” I said, lightly mimicking his German accent, right next to the German employee I’d just been speaking to. “So please give ’em my apologies for missing it.”

“No,” she said. “You’re going to Skokie.”

I laughed. She picked up her cell and called one of the PR reps who was already at the site. She wrote down an address, several cell numbers, and then got out her purse. She handed me $80 and said, “Go get a cab, give the driver this address, and tell him to avoid the highway, because the traffic is hell. When you get to the industrial park, call Christine at this number and she’ll direct you to the right building.”

“The cab line’s going to be hellish,” I told her.

“So get going now!” I later found out she was former military, which made sense.

The thought of a post-show cab-line made me flash back to the 2006 BIO meeting, the last time the event was held in Chicago. I had to stay late at the show one afternoon to interview someone. When I finished, I discovered that the taxi line was about 2 miles long, and there were only 2 cabs outside. I thought I’d be smart and go to the hotel next door. The taxi line was around a mile long, and there were no taxis. I started to walk, even thought it was a long-ass hike through some crap neighborhoods back to my hotel. I fell in behind some venture capital guys in nice suits. We passed one of those buses that’s made up to look like a trolley. The driver was outside, leaning against the door. One of the suits said, “Hey, pal, how much to get us downtown?” The driver laughed.

I said to him, “I will give you $20 right now to get me the f*** out of here and back to my hotel.”

He looked at me for a second, grokked my utter seriousness, then said, “Get on!” I called to the VC guys to get on the bus: “$20 each. Let’s go!” They jumped aboard, and off we went. It’s my addition to Tom Chiarella’s great Esquire article on the $20 Theory of the Universe.

So I had visions of that episode as I hurried back downstairs to the taxi line. The line was huge, but the cabs were coming in a steady procession this time. One of the women at the front of the line saw a friend of hers approaching and said, “The line’s about 10 minutes long!”

I got on and waited. When my turn came, a beat-up minivan was my ride. The taxi attendant opened the door, and I got on. She slid the door closed . . . and it slid right off the railing.

My driver leaped out of his seat, ran around the cab, and fiddled with the door panel, which was hanging precariously from the side of the cab. He blamed the attendant, which made me laugh, and kept sliding the door and pushing it in, till it finally caught and closed. I tried to get out and take another cab, but he wouldn’t let me go.

And off we went.

I decided my driver was Ugandan, because it explained his clipped accent, his exceedingly dark skin, and his uncanny resemblance to Idi Amin. I gave him the paper with my destination, and he stared at it, puzzled. He soon called someone and got general directions to Skokie. Meanwhile, I was plugging the address into my iPhone, hoping to get some idea of where I was headed.

Traffic was insane, and apparently normal for 6:15 on a weekday. The driver took me on Lakeshore Drive to avoid the highway, but we were still crawling. I passed the time by trying to understand anything he said.

When I figured out that trips to the suburbs incurred a 1.5x charge on the meter, I told him, “Oh, so when that thing hits $50, you may as well kick my ass out of this cab, because I only have $80 on me.”

We slogged on. My Maps-app told me we were 26 minutes away from my destination, but that wasn’t taking the traffic into consideration. Ten minutes later, I was 24 minutes away. I wondered if this was Zeno’s App.

The cabbie later refused to believe that Rt. 41, Lakeshore’s alternate name, continued on to Skokie. Instead, he took us through some gnarly-ass neighborhoods, before getting onto Touhy Dr. Then he asked me for directions. I became his turn-by-turn GPS, all the while keeping an eye on the meter.

By 7:15 or so, we reached the science park. I was going to call for final directions, but noticed the shuttle bus parked outside a building. We drove to it, and he shut off the meter. The final tally was $58, so I gave him $70 and got a receipt. I used the door on the other side of the cab. It didn’t fall off.

Throughout the drive, I tried to come up with dramatic entrance lines. I refused to be embarrassed by missing the bus, given the shoddiness of Peter’s directions. Instead, I played up a combo of brashness and rogueness, telling myself, “Take command of this situation! So what if they’re German? Don’t be intimidated! You’ve seen Inglourious Basterds twice! Including opening day!”

It turned out that they were the ones who were embarrassed and apologetic. My PR contact swooped outside, took my arm, and kept telling me how sorry they were that I was inconvenienced. (You should know that all of my stereotype-goofing on Germans is actually a silly affectation on my part, sort of a “I’m Jewish therefore I goof on Germans” shtick. People from this company always been polite and non-pushy to me. The one time they screwed me over on an article (top-level management used to be very micro-managing and cautious; they’re much more open nowadays), they were so embarrassed that they sent me a high-end backpack for the holidays, because I once wrote an editorial that mentioned hiking.)

“How was your ride?” she asked.

“. . . Educational,” I told her. She got me a name badge and led me into a conference room where they were giving their pre-tour presentations. I was gratified to discover that the presentations were largely a rehashing of information about the facility that I’d already seen. In other words, the hour-plus I missed turned out to be utterly missable! And I got the crazy experience of the Ugandan Limited, to boot!

The facility tour was fine. I won’t bore you any further with those details, except for one great moment near the end.

See, what Vetter does is aseptically fill vials, syringes, ampules and other vessels that deliver high-value drugs. They do it really well, and they develop advanced systems for the injectors and other delivery devices. They do commercial-scale work at their Ravensburg facility; this new site is intended only for materials to be used in clinical trials. So it’s smaller volumes of vials and such.

After showing us the labs, filling suites, lyophilizers and other equipment (or spaces where equipment will soon arrive), we saw the visual inspection room. Here, a woman picked up four vials, held them up against a white cardboard background, rotated and agitated them, holding them up against a black background, and peered into the liquids, looking for contaminants, particulates, and Stuff That Shouldn’t Be In There. (Like rubber, fiber and/or metal.)

Our guide told us that Vetter’s visual inspectors are very well trained: “They  have very specific amounts of time they can work before they have to take breaks, and very specific exercises they have to do during their breaks, to make sure their eyes are good and they are not slipping. They are tested often, as it is critical that we do not ship vials that have contaminants in them.”

We watched her pick up another four vials and go through the same routine of inspection. “You see,” the guide said, “Suzanne spends her days looking for defects.”

“Eureka!” I thought. “I now have the female lead for a romantic comedy set in a pharma facility!” My mind was flooded with images of her at home, visually checking all of the little ways her husband or boyfriend disappoints her around the house. Would she ever meet the one man who had no visible defects or flaws? Paging Nora Ephron!

We had a light buffet dinner after the tour, around 8:45. I sat down with my buddy Peter, and said, “‘Downstairs between the two buildings’? Next time, let’s just meet up at your booth!”

“I am so sorry, Gil. But at least you made it!”

And I managed to get on the shuttle bus back to the hotel, too! Day 1 of the show came to an end around 10:30.

NEXT: “Jumping with my boy Sid in the city”

May 3: Bloodshot Eye of the Tiger

May 4: Skokie, the Germans, and the Lost Ugandan

May 5: “Jumpin’ with my boy Sid in the city”

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Funny books

During the height of the finance boom, I was able to get paid $375 per hour — and a minimum of three hours — by investment groups that wanted my advice about pharmaceutical facility acquisitions. I knew then that banks were going to implode. After all, people responsible for hundreds of millions — if not billions — in investments concluded I was an expert worth paying for advice? And that my advice was worth taking? The center could not hold.

I’m glad that I lead a relatively inextravagant lifestyle, because I managed to spend around $300 in little more than an hour at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival today. Sadly, I actually budgeted that amount before heading into NYC for the event.

The damage, in chronological order:

1. Lincoln Tunnel toll: $8

2. One-day admission: $12

3. Jaime Hernandez illustration of Maggie Chascarillo (the 7th Jaime illustration I now own): $100

4. Fantagraphics Books table: $90 (with tax)

5. Picturebox table: $25

6. Top Shelf table: $6

7. Drawn & Quarterly table: $50 (with in-show discount)

8. Barbecue turkey burger at Pete’s Tavern: $11 w/tip

9. Parking: $13 w/tip

Grand Total: $315 in a little more than an hour.

So, um, if you know any investment groups that need advice on facility acquisitions, send ’em my way!

Because you’re all clamoring for it, here’s the Jaime drawing I bought.

maggie

You can view all 7 of my Jaime illos over here.

And a couple of pix from MoCCA are over here.

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Exorcism Weekend

If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.

–Soren Kierkegaard

Ever wonder where all those Unrequired Reading links come from? I use NetNewsWire for my RSS reader. It helps me keep track of 150+ RSS feeds, and has its own browser for feeds that I want to click through. The problem is, I have a tendency to save tabs “for later”, and there are presently more than 60 browser windows open in the program.

I save some pages for my own edification, not necessarily for posting. Still, I have a feeling all these tabs are starting to impair my computer’s ability to keep me happy, so I’ve decided to thin out the ranks today. After all, there are also more than 800 unread items in the feed. That’s about two days’ accumulation of feeds. I’ll zap through some of them en masse, but read some of the others pretty intently.

So let’s go through a whole ton of links that I meant to write about, but never got around to and likely never will! I’ll even share the “just for me” links, goofy as they are! (I thought about writing this as 88 Lines about 44 Links, but didn’t think I’d be able to make it all rhyme; sorry.)

Orwell

I meant to write a whole lot about George Orwell, and that’s why the following links have been sitting in my tabs for so darned long.

The Masterpiece That Killed George Orwell – Orwell’s last days on Jura, writing 1984. (5/10/09)

Oxford Literary Festival: George Orwell’s son speaks for the first time about his father – Richard Blair was only 6 when his adoptive dad died, but he liked life on Jura. (3/15/09)

TS Eliot’s snort of rejection for Animal Farm – Ha-ha! You were wrong, Tough Shit! (3/29/09)

A Fine Rage – James Wood on Orwell. I haven’t read this yet; the link is only for an abstract, and I’m not a New Yorker subscriber, so I gotta hit the library sometime and find the original. Sure sounds interesting, and it’s got a great Ralph Steadman illo of Orwell. (4/13/09)

Eternal Vigilance – Keith Gessen on Orwell’s essays, eventually getting around to the problematic nature of my favorite one: Inside the Whale. (5/28/09)

Bumming Smokes in Paris and London: George Orwell’s Obsession with Tobacco – I once argued that the real horror of 1984 isn’t the rats in a cage or the police busting down the door, but rather the dull razor blades and the cigarettes that fall apart. This PopMatters article may cover that, but it’s SEVEN PAGES LONG and the single-page version is poorly formatted and won’t resize in my browser. So I’ll never know. (6/19/09)

Curse Ye, Orwell! – I hadn’t gotten around to reading this Popmatters article about the limitations of Orwell’s Why I Write essay till now, but it strikes me that the author takes Orwell’s writing as far too canonical and literal. Pfeh. (1/22/10)

Libraries

I wanted to write about the thinning out of my library. I had some thoughts about the process of admitting that there are books you will never get around to reading, a theme I hit on before, and how my tastes and interests have changed.

Shelf Life – William H. Gass on his library. (12/07)

Longing for Great Lost Works – Stephen Marche on the (maybe) wonderful books, plays and poems that were lost. Sorta like all the blog-posts I abandoned, right? (4/18/09)

Books do furnish a life – Roger Ebert on the books that mount up in his office library. (10/5/09)

Antilibraries – Jason Kottke on Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Umberto Eco on how the books we haven’t read menace us. (6/1/09)

2009 Commencement Address by Daniel Mendelsohn – Beautiful story about why we read the classics, which would’ve helped (in part) with my justification for tossing many contemporary/ephemeral books from my library. (5/15/09)

Middlebrow Messiahs – A review of a book about the history of the Great Books as a commercial concept. The book is uncharitable toward St. John’s College, where I went to grad school, but the reviewer takes the writer to task for that. (1/16/09)

Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor – Here’s another essay inspired by that book and the idea of middlebrow culture striving for intellectual achievement. Obviously, I was going to write some sort of essay about my time at St. John’s around this. (10/5/09)

The Arcadia Fire

Speaking of the classics, destroying libraries, and the conversation with the past, I really wanted to write about Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. I may still. Here are the first few paragraphs of an abortive attempt:

I’ve written before about my evolving relationship with works of art (mainly books, movies and music) and their touchstone-y nature in my life. I think my best take on it was my year-end post in 2008 — I’ve written plenty on works that meant a lot to me once upon a time, but make me cringe now, as well as works that have grown in my estimation over the years.

Sometimes I think I’ve neglected to tell you about the works that have retained their importance to me all these years. Partly it’s because of how familiar I am with them, how much they’ve come to inform who I am and how I understand things. Partly it’s because I’m afraid that I’ll fail to do them justice, that I’ll come up short in my descriptions of them and their importance.

I could give you a list of books that have stuck with me all this time, beginning with Orwell’s essays and Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and it’d be a nice counterweight to my 0-fer series, where I celebrate all the lacunae in my reading universe.

Which brings me to Arcadia.

Eh. Here are some of the links that would’ve woven into the piece.

Et In Arcadia – Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variaion kicked things off for me by noting two revivals of Arcadia in D.C. and London. (5/15/09)

Warmly, an ‘Arcadia’ That’s Most Calculating – Peter Marks at The Washington Post reviews the D.C. revival. I imagine that the editor who wrote that headline must be very difficult to understand in conversation. (5/15/09)

Dinner with the FT: Sir Tom Stoppard – Illuminating conversation covering the London revival of Arcadia and Stoppard’s adaptation of Chekhov. Plus you get to find out what they spent on the meal.(5/15/09)

Books

Interview: Katherine Dunn – I could’ve sworn I posted this AV Club interview with Katherine “Geek Love” Dunn before, but I’m not finding any link for it on the site. Oops. (5/21/09)

Outsmarted – Another big John Lanchester review/essay in The New Yorker about finance. I’m undecided about reading his new book on the subject, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. (6/1/09)

50 Must-Read Novels from the 20th Century – Do you miss that Literary 0-fers series I used to post, about authors and series I’ve never read a word of? I was going to use this list for that. Since it has White Noise on the list and describes it as “beautifully postmodern,” you don’t really have to subject yourself to this one.

When Lit Blew Into Bits – This was going to be near the center for my Books of the Decade post, which got derailed when a pal of mine died unexpectedly. It’s got some neat arguments, even if it neglects to mention that Oscar Wao is a prose hybrid-rewrite of the Hernandez Bros.’ Love & Rockets comics. (12/6/09)

Rilke the clay pot – I wish I had the stamina to make it through this review of a new translation of Rilke’s poems, a new bio and a collection his correspondence with Lou Andreas-Salomé. Alas, I’m going to delete it after six months. (9/16/09)

The Hack – How did Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ time as a journalist affect his prose? Sadly, I don’t care enough to finish the article. (Jan/Feb 2010)

Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy – A rare interview with Cormac McCarthy. I don’t dig his work very much, but it’s a fascinating conversation. (11/20/09)

Court of Opinion – A New York Magazine book club-style discussion of Bill Simmons’ Book of Basketball. I quit reading that book after discovering that the Robert Horry writeup consisted of a 3-page reprint of one of Simmons’ columns. Still, it was fun to get other people’s perspectives. (12/8/09)

Movies

Vulcan: The Soul of Spock – A video essay from Matt Zoller Seitz on Spock-As-Othello. (5/6/09)

Zen Pulp: The World of Michael Mann, Pt. 1: Vice Precedent – Zoller Seitz also did a series of video essays on Michael Mann’s movies, partly focusing on the idea that Mann is obsessed with work, albeit not in the way that Charlie Kaufman’s scripts all seem to be about work and how it defines us. (7/1/09)

The Ubiquitous Anderson – A video essay about the pernicious influence of Wes Anderson, from the prism of Rian Johnson’s movie The Brothers Bloom. I haven’t watched this yet and, since I didn’t like The Brothers Bloom very much, probably won’t. (5/21/09)

Quentin Tarantino lists his top films of 2009 – Star Trek was #1, so whatever.(12/14/09)

Bourgeois Surrender

A pal of mine from St. John’s has been blogging under that handle for a while. I’ve reposted him from time to time.

Music Post – I haven’t clicked through all the links to the music and videos. Glad we share an affinity for the Pet Shop Boys. (Gayyyy. . . .) (10/5/09)

Yeats: “Sailing to Byzantium” – B.S. is a good reader (and re-reader) of books, plays and poetry, so I’ve saved some of the ones for pieces that I’ve yet to read.

Shelley: “Ode to the West Wind” – I wish I read more poetry. (11/4/09)

Julius Caesar: Part I and Part II – Embarrassingly, I haven’t read Julius Caesar yet. I really oughtta get on that. (4/25/09 and 5/1/09)

People Must Love a Good Blog Post – He covers a couple of subjects, but focuses on Hollywood of the 1970’s, considered via Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, (or How the Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Generation Saved Hollywood).

Books in a Digital Age – I’m afraid this long Sven Birkerts’ essay will boil down to “books good, internet bad,” but I haven’t read it yet. Given the nature of this post of mine, he’s probably right. (Spring 2010)

Comics

Interview: Joe Sacco – I’m saving this till I read Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. (1/18/10)

Preface to Mid-Life Creative Imperatives, Part 1 of 3 – Springboarding off Jeet Heer’s post about what great cartoonists did in their middle-age, Gary Groth recently wrote an epic take on the subject. I think. Approaching 40, I was interested in the topic, but feared I wouldn’t finish reading it before turning 50. (2/24/10)

CR Holiday Interviews #9 (Jeet Heer) and #11 (Timothy Hodler) – Tom Spurgeon at Comics Reporter published a great series of interviews around the holidays. I pulled a couple of them and keep meaning to go back and read the whole shebang, but I was most interested in checking out these guys, who are both good comics critics. (12/29/09 and 12/31/09)

Etc.

The Architect of 9/11 – I haven’t gotten around to reading these posts about Mohamed Atta, and how his architecture background may have influenced his radicalism and his role in 9/11. (9/8/09)

The Chess Master and the Computer – I was gonna tie this Garry Kasparov review into a conversation I had c.1994 about how the changeover to CD and digital recording may have subtly affected the way music was played and recorded. Nowadays, some artists are recording in ways that play to the narrower range of MP3 compression and/or ringtone speakers, and I’m glad to be vindicated in that. Playing chess against computers changes the way we learn and play chess. (2/11/10)

Ennui Becomes Us – A National Interest article about how the world’s going to hell or something, as per the second law of thermodynamics. No, seriously: information entropy is behind everything. It’s like Thomas Pynchon c. 1965. (12/16/09)

Seizing the Opportunity to Destroy Western Civilization – Speaking of which, World War I was a black swan. (3/4/10)

Edge People – The latest installment in Tony Judt’s memoirs, post-ALS. (2/23/10)

The agony of a body artist – I’m not sure what I was going to do with this Roger Ebert blog post about performance artist Chris Burden. (10/14/09)

Andy Warhol’s TV – I still wanna write about Plimpton and Warhol and celebrity in New York. I’ll probably get some good material out of watching these Warhol TV shows from the ’80’s.(7/1/09)

NYC Grid

I love Paul Sahner’s daily photo-essays of New York, one block at a time on NYC Grid. But I fell behind last month, and have a couple of them tabbed (as well as a bunch as unread news items).

Just For Me

The Essential Home Bar – I care about my gin. (2/18/10)

This year, I started to care about how I dress, so I have some men’s fashion sites in my RSS.

Feature: Footwear With Jesse Thorn of PutThisOn.com – I need some variety in my shoes, okay? (3/9/10)

The Pants After Jeans – It’s difficult for me to find a pair of pants that fit well (not too tight in the crotchal region, not too balloony for the rest of the leg). (2/28/10)

I still want to get back to fiction writing someday. So:

Ten rules for writing fiction – A bunch of writers offer up their antidote to Elmore Leonard’s weird 10 rules. It took me a while to start it, because I’m that good at procrastinating when it comes to my own writing. (2/20/10)

How to Write a Great Novel: Junot Diaz, Anne Rice, Margaret Atwood and Other Authors Tell – Sort of a shorthand version of those Paris Review Writers At Work interviews. (11/13/09)

Overcoming Creative Block – Strategies visual artists use to get out of a rut. There’s some good stuff in here. I’m sure one technique is to quit reading so many RSS feeds. (2/10/10)