| September 13, 2000 | Dour Day for Scour |
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The evening I returned from Burning Man (I arrived in Los Angeles at 11:30 PM after unpacking my campmates' trucks in Sacramento and then driving for 7 or so hours), I had a full tape of messages on my answering machine. Among them was a message from my boss, Lawrence. He said, "Jess, it's really important that you call me. I have some news, and it isn't good. You can call me at any time." Well, I thought to myself, they obviously layed off the web production department, and my friends Selena, John, Steve, Lawrence, Arlene, Tim, and Michele and I no longer have jobs. Before I allowed myself to get too upset, I decided to call Lawrence. It was around midnight, but he said it was all right to call, so I did. As it turned out, Scour had not only layed off the production department, they had layed off *everyone*. Engineering team, business development, ad sales, everyone. Only the 12 founders will be staying onboard to try to keep the company afloat through the lawsuit over peer-to-peer file-sharing. Apparently, some big investors they were expecting to receive funding from, pulled out due to the lawsuit. (I guess they didn't want to invest millions of their dollars in a company that might be shut down in the near future due to a federal ruling. Go figure.) So, on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, Scour's founders realized that they had completely run out of money and needed to let everyone go. I had missed the emotional "suprise" company meeting on Friday afternoon where everyone learned that they were being let go with only one week's severance pay because I was out braving the dust storms at Burning Man. The weird thing is, I didn't freak out too much about hearing this. I suppose I'm getting used to my start-up jobs just disappearing overnight without much warning. CollegeBeat went under in the fall of 1998. WildWeb went under in the fall of 1999. So, I guess I'm just embracing the fly-by-night "anything can happen" mentality. Labels: scour, selena, startup, web, wildweb posted by Jess Barron @ 10:23 PM 
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| October 20, 1999 | Living in the Wild, Wild West |
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If you've wondered why I haven't updated my online journal in a few weeks, it's because I've been in the process of moving myself and all of my material possessions (including my computer) from Boston to Los Angeles. WildWeb transferred me out to the west coast to help open their new office. I've been wanting to move to California for at least a year, so I was glad to get the opportunity to finally do it. I am enjoying L.A. so far. Bocce and I are currently staying at Hillary's apartment in Hollywood. She and I just signed a lease on a new place in West Los Angeles with Jeff, who resigned from his job at The Nation earlier this month. He's leaving New York to come out here and live with Hillary, Bocce, and me. During the week I've been in L.A., I already witnessed an incredible car crash (a Range Rover flipped over outside our window on Hollywood Boulevard while Hillary, Chris, and I were eating dinner. The driver emerged from his overturned vehicle completely unscathed. The weird thing is that just minutes before we saw the accident, we had been talking about all the crazy car crashes they were able to cram into each episode on CHiPs) and ordered beer from Pink Dot. Our new apartment is OK, I suppose, though the style is this terrible faux colonial. There were borders around the top of the walls (I insisted that they rip them down when they repaint the place for us next week) and a fake brick floor in the entry way. I hate that I'm so tied to aesthetics, but it just isn't the kind of place I imagined I'd be living in. I guess I'm afraid we're going to be living in condo hell with all of the trappings, including gated parking and central air conditioning. I'm most worried about the negative effects such a place could have on Bocce. She is a delicate creature with refined sensibilities about taste and style. Being forced to live in an unattractive environment could cause permanent scars on her already issue-ridden psyche. Lee had told me again and again that I would probably want to live in Los Feliz or Fairfax or Hancock Park. And J.P. had been insisting that I get a place in Los Feliz/Silverlake which is where he lives. But Hillary said that that area is too long of a commute to Century City where she works. Also, Jeff and I figure that we will be working somewhere near the Westside. WildWeb is currently looking for office space in Santa Monica. Since we were looking for a three bedroom that allowed dogs, there weren't many listings available that suited our needs. So, we signed the lease on this apartment in West LA, sort of near Westwood. And I really shouldn't complain about our new place that we haven't even moved into yet, but when we visited Paul's apartment in Santa Monica this weekend I found that his place was exactly what I had imagined and hoped that my apartment in Los Angeles would be like. His place has hardwood floors (as opposed to our wall to wall carpeting) and funky tiles in the kitchen and bathroom (as opposed to our linoleum). What's more -- he has a view of the Santa Monica mountains, while our view is comprised of the stucco apartment building across the street. I told Paul that he won't be allowed to come over to our apartment. I'm sure his classes at SCI-Arc have only enhanced his natural disdain for unpleasant architecture. Once we move into this place, Jeff, Hillary, and Bocce and I will need to completely embrace our new home. I won't have anyone copping pretentious attitude about our place. At Jeff's behest, we will keep a sense of humor about it and possibly invest in a few naugohyde recliners to tie in the whole "look." Our new place has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, two balconies, central air, a fireplace, parking, and a dishwasher -- so I really have no right to complain. I especially shouldn't be complaining since I will be inhabiting the master bedroom which has two closets -- all the better to contain my copious clothing collection (and my omnipresent alliterations -- which I assure you, I will keep inside my closet from now on. Your eyes and ears should not be senselessly bombarded by my letter repetition addiction). Jeff arrives in L.A. next week and it'll be interesting to see how the three of us get along living together. We've known each other since our high school days in suburban Northboro, Massachusetts. I hope this experiment in cooperative living doesn't end in disaster. As far as I'm concerned, as long as we procure a TV so that we can watch "Dawson's Creek" and "Buffy" each week, everything will go swimmingly. We may also want to build a confessional booth a la MTV's Real World so that we can spill all of our angst and dirty secrets to a video camera on a weekly basis. Labels: jeff, la, losangeles, wildweb posted by Jess Barron @ 10:03 PM
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| August 16, 1999 | I'm Going to Burning Man |
 Burn, Baby, Burn: Tonight I picked up my plane tickets to go out to San Francisco next week for Burning Man. I'm starting to feel some substantial anxiety about the trip. Will I survive camping in the desert for five days? Mindy and I finally came up with an idea for a theme camp, although Lee doesn't think it's exciting enough. I would tell you what it is, but Mindy doesn't want me to talk about it until afterward. You can check out my ticket (and notice how it says "you voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death by attending"): I tried to explain what Burning Man was to my mom, but I don't think she got it. I told her it was this huge conglomeration of spontaneous performance art and people just "acting out" all over the place, but she just kept calling it "that concert you're going to." If you're curious about this Burning Man thing, don't worry. I'm going to take tons of photos and probably shoot some digital video as well. And of course, I'll write a few articles for WildWeb and keep a Daily Desert Journal. It now even looks as though I will be involved in the segment for our TV show as well. I'll let you know when it will air. Pavement Poems: I'm going to take a brief respite from expounding in technicolour detail about myself to mention that Ms. Hillary Field of Los Angeles (my favorite Boggle-playing buddy) sent a few of her poetic experiments to Matador Records' Pavement Poetry Project. And before her fans could begin to chant "A for effort, B for delivery..." she was listed among the 25 winners! Alas, she laments that the poem she entered under Jeff's name won better prizes than the poem she submitted under her own name. I do think I like the latter one better, but it seems that the peeps from Matador probably wanted to play out the Scrabble metaphor. And you really can't blame them; Scrabble is such a great game. Allyson Krieger, Miss Thang She Said, She Said: Allyson "Miss Thang" Krieger and I finally wrote our much talked about and long-awaited Teen Vs. Adult TV episode of "She Said, She Said." Alas, I no longer feel as good about the result as I had initially believed. First, as soon as the article went online Lee Charles Baker accused me of messing up his quote. He insisted he would *never* use "overanalyze" and "deconstruct" in the same sentence. Though he *was* copping pretentious attitude with me on the phone when he said the quote, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and changed it to the verbiage that currently sits in the 13th paragraph. Second, I think I lost track of what should have been one of my major points -- the idea that TV shows about teen characters are intriguing because the teen years are a time when people's personalities are being formed. Events that occur during the teen years can have a huge significance on a person's life. Somehow Ray Weigel I neglected to mention this in my article, and for this I should be thrashed. Our "Austin Powers, Hip or Has-Been?" feature came out much better, I think. It's a Shame About Ray: Ray "yo Jimmy" Weigel is out of our office on vacation for the entire month of August. I am not sure how we are all making it through these difficult days without anyone begging us to meet for drinks at the Rainforest cafe in Burlington. My aural pleasure has certainly declined in Ray's absence. And I am finding that I no longer say "duuude" as much either. Thankfully, Erin and Allyson are making sure the Caption Cornycopia isn't neglected. Que Sera, Sarah: On Saturday I went over to Sarah's (my dad's ex-girlfriend's) house to visit. I hung out with Sarah, her baby Misha, her husband Iourie, and Iourie's dad who is visiting from St. Petersburg. Iourie's dad convinced me to take a few shots of a drink called, mysteriously enough, "Russian balm." The stuff was scary. MishaSarah made some delicious pasta salad and we looked at old photos Sarah took of my brother and me in the '80s. Complete-Lee Enjoyable: So you read all the way to the bottom, and you expected to get some details about Lee's visit to the East Coast three week's ago. Nosy, aren't ye? Well, in this case, I am not going to put out so easily. All I'm going to tell you is that Lee passed his NASD test and he's now some sort of uber options broker. I made him a mix tape to celebrate. We got very lost on our first night out in Newark, New Jersey and it took us about two hours to find our way back into the sanctity of the hotel room. We kept seeing the glowing neon lights of our Courtyard Marriot in the distance as we descended and ascended on various on-ramps and off-ramps, but we could never maneuver ourselves over to where it was. I've never laughed so hard during such a frustrating experience. Honestly. I was laughing so hard that I thought my ribs were breaking. And I was driving. This is a good sign, I think. Labels: allyson, burningman, lee, wildweb posted by Jess Barron @ 10:15 AM
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