BEER Ch. 6, 61-67: lunch with a venture capitalist

[Monte Davis]

Maxine has followed the money downstream (hashslingrz's disbursements) and
now turns upstream to hwgahwgh.com's investors. What are the
"emergency-vehicle exhaust-fume issues" (61) that might prompt an investor
to need her services? All I can puzzle out of the phrase is "ambulance
chaser," which doesn't fit or help.

 

I felt the need of an ambulance myself on learning that Journey's 'Don
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k8craCGpgs> 't Stop Believin' ' - source of
the phrase "streetlight people" -- is "the top-selling catalog track in
iTunes history with over 5 million digital copies sold, as well as the
best-selling rock song in digital history.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Stop_Believin%27>  " Why would
Slagiatt and associates have chosen that then-20-year-old song?

 

Office furniture design namechecks : the Nightingale
<http://www.archiexpo.com/prod/nightingale/traditional-office-armchairs-5652
8-441743.html> "Buddy" model, Zooey Chu
<http://www.cumberlandfurniture.com/designer/zooey-chu/> , Otto Zapf
<http://www.knoll.com/designer/Otto-Zapf> , all in a "cast-iron-front
ex-factory space
<https://www.google.com/search?q=soho+cast+iron+historic+district&newwindow=
1&safe=off&client=firefox-beta&hs=IFR&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isc
h&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=MQptUr3HBobNkQeHjIFQ&ved=0CDwQsAQ&biw=1200&bih=1
430> . Karmic echoes of the sweatshop era long smoothed away." NYC real
estate again: from the late 19th to mid-20th century, this building type
dominated the middle of Lower Manhattan from Chambers St. north to 23
<http://www.aaccessmaps.com/images/maps/us/ny/lower_manhattan/lower_manhatta
n.gif> rd St., with light manufacturing (including sweatshops) on the upper
floors. After WWII, without off-street truck loading areas, and with limited
floor loadings for larger machinery, many lost out to competitors in
business parks on the new highways outside the city. Artists seeking big
cheap workspace trickled in to replace them -- and being artists and broke,
often set up housekeeping in the nominal studios. 

 

See Tom Wolfe
<http://www.amazon.com/The-Painted-Word-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312427581>  for the
ensuing cultural dynamics: after enough post-opening parties in the big open
loft spaces, gallery owners open satellite storefronts in SoHo ("South of
Houston St"); uptown art patrons, enchanted by the remaining grit,  see
themselves in Alan Bates <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078444/> ' dazzling
white studio. Hip fashion, art, and lifestyle purveyors fill the
storefronts. Voila: through the late 1970s and 1980s rents explode, and
first-generation artist tenants as well as surviving manufacturers are
priced out. Replay, faster, rentals beginning to go co-op or condo, for
parts of TriBeCa ("triangle below Canal St.")  and Chelsea. Will it happen
again in the 1990s, as dot-com boom operations like Streetlight People move
in with even more, hotter money to spend? Youbetcha. New versions of the
culture/money bulldozer at Lincoln Center, this time with modems instead of
the Met. Higher land and property values mean more tax revenue for
hard-pressed City Hall. This is a freewheeling financial frontier for
real-estate redevelopment as well as for exploitation of the Internet's
infinitely expanding unreal estate.  This is New York City. This is what we
do.

 

All the while, Little Italy
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Italy,_Manhattan>  and Chinatown
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown,_Manhattan>  (stomping grounds for
sections of V and AtD, respectively) hang on. The former yields the
sometimes "disingenuously ethnic" venture capitalist Rocky Slagiatt, who
gives Maxine kind of a Cary Grant tingle - and more dirt on Gabriel Ice --
as they spar over spreadsheets and lunch.

 

62: "'Nah, the drag-along is set in cement. The full ratchet, maybe
do-able.'" Not construction, not Little Italy's problematic uses of cement,
but start-up finance:
http://www.analystforum.com/forums/cfa-forums/cfa-level-ii-forum/9969897

 

64: "'they own a boat?'...'What am I, Moby Dick? You're that curious, go out
there and see.'" Call me Maxine: these risky quests can take you into deep
waters.

 

65: "Pastafazool" is the old Sicilian-Neapolitan immigrant sociolect; "pasta
e fagioli" is what the uptown Eurofoodies come looking for.

 

66-67: "you [Italian] folks and your longtime GOP connections. Lucky
Luciano,  the OSS [Fangoso Lagoon? The Wayvones?]. should I bring up [Jewish
mobster] Longy Zwillman?" We heard mention of Meyer Lansky earlier; perhaps
there's a missed cameo opportunity here for Mott Street tong warriors? For
Pynchon, who sat in the row behind us watching The Godfather and Bugsy and
The Departed, stereotypes of "un-American" crime are distractions from
thinking about solid, serious WASPs doing their solid, serious thing in
Orange County, Palm Springs, Oyster Bay, the Hamptons, McLean
<https://www.cia.gov/index.html> , Fort Meade <http://www.nsa.gov/> .      

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