Empty ships will slow
My second or third night I’d ever been in San Francisco was in May of 1997, and I spent the whole night sitting at a rented Mac on the floor of Moscone Center listening to the Creeper Lagoon e.p. on repeat. I’d bought it, hand to hand, from Sharky Laguna a few nights earlier at a Jad Fair/CL show Michael Ferguson took me to.
Mentioned here because, just over ten years later, I’m sitting here, listening to that record on repeat right now, and I suddenly remembered the reason I had to spend my second or third night in San Francisco sitting at a rented Mac on the floor of Moscone Center.
It was because the on-site “web magazine” for DB/EXPO (for which I was the hapless designer) was launching the next morning on that same show floor. And because, against my strenuous complaint, the head guy had picked a proprietary MS publishing system that wouldn’t let me hand code the piles of needed HTML in BBEdit. So, I had to figure out a way to get around that. Because you know why? Because if I opened any of the CMS’s assy proprietary binary files in a text editor, it would corrupt the entire system and everything would explode in shower of DLLs or whateverthefuck.
“Sorry, man,” they explained, “but we don’t really have a way to deal with Macs or ‘text files.’”
For the life of me, I can’t remember how we ended up making it go (I think I resigned myself to literally hand-coding everything via the textarea of their equally-assy 1997 web interface).
But I for sure remember bonding with those five wonderful songs while a fine San Francisco evening went on without me.
