LA

So I went to LA for the opening of the new Starbucks/ Hear Music store. I have been working on this project on and off for 3 years. I was excited. I haven’t been to LA for a while and the Hear Music group was paying for the whole trip. I went with my friend Sandy who is also managing part of the project.

Before we left Sea-Tac, Sandy and I ran into Brady Stephens. He’s a marketing guy at Starbucks and was on his way down to the see the store also. He offered to give us a ride from the airport to the store. Ha! I didn’t have to drive on THE 405!

Our flight down was fine. We took a shuttle to the rental car place, got into Brad’s car, and discovered that is was a special car made for people without legs. There were unique attachments on the steering wheel that would allow someone to accelerate or stop the car using their thumbs. We drove around the lot a few times, each taking turns stopping the car with our thumbs. Eventually we decided that none of us was brave enough to get on the freeway in the special car. We turned it in and got a regular car with gas and brake pedals, and then we headed for...THE 405.

But, before getting on THE 405, I turned the radio dial to 89.3 FM, KPCC - not 89.9 KCRW. As you should know KCRW is the most listened to and most powerful public radio station in America. I listened to them streaming on the web, gave them money twice a year, gott crappy t-shirts or coffee mugs, and made my friends and coworkers listen to this station. Past tense. I used to do all that. I have been in an ongoing feud with KCRW for two weeks since they fired my close personal friend, Sandra Tsing Loh for saying “fuck” on the air.


It wasn’t really on the air, it was taped, and the word “fuck” was supposed to be bleeped out. The engineer forgot to bleep out the word, and it played on a Sunday morning, twice…fuck intact .

They fired her on Monday. Naturally I was outraged and immediately began bombarding KCRW with hate mail, using the F word in every sentence. I also started sending mail to all of KCRW’s corporate underwriters, including Hear Music. I asked Jill, my friend in Hear Music, to stop all their corporate support for KCRW. Jill informed me that I was deranged, that KCRW was “their bread and butter”, and that I needed to get a life. But then she invited me down for the store opening. It turns out that the day before I left for LA KCRW offered Sandra her job back.
To her credit Sandra said “Fucking no thanks!” to coming back to KCRW.

My hero



So before that little side bar about fucking KCRW, we were about to get on the freeway.

In LA people don’t just get on I-5 and take it to I-90, no, Angelinos have names for their freeways. You leave LAX, hop on THE 405, take THE 405 to THE 10. You could also take THE 5 to THE 101, but you’d be going the wrong way. Of course THE 405 is also called THE San Diego Freeway, THE 10 is called THE Santa Monica Freeway, THE 101 is called The Hollywood Freeway…its all very confusing. Anyway, we landed in LA at 8:30, played around with the thumb brakes for a while, finally got on THE 405 at 9:15, and needed to be at the store by 9:30. “Cal Trans tells us there is a SigAlert on THE 405 at Ventura Boulevard”, we heard on KCRW. We didn’t know what this meant, but traffic was horrible.

Brad drives like a nut case since he grew up in LA, so while the freeway was clogged and very busy, he continued to drive 95 miles and hour, tailgating everyone. We made it from LAX to Santa Monica in 4 minutes, giving us plenty of time to park, walk to the store, get a cup off coffee and a mini-wheat-blueberry-muffin prior to the Howard Schultz – Fiona Apple press conference at 9:30.

As you know, Howard is the president of Sawbucks. The Fiona chick is in charge of Hewlett Packard (HP to us insiders). HP was installing all the new digital music equipment in the store. Oh, I haven’t explained about this yet. This HP stuff is cool. The idea to allow customers to scan a music CD at any one of 70 listening stations in the store, listen to any of the tracks over head phones, then buy the CD if you want. Another nifty thing is that you can burn and print your own CD selecting the specific tracks you want. Artwork and liner notes are included. So Howard is sitting there waiting to speak and he either looks really sick or really angry. We all agree he must be sick, because if he is angry it means he does not like what we have done at this store and we are all fired.

Howard gets up and tells the press that this is the next big thing, digital music. “Digital music is big, like digital cable, digital brewing, digital thermometers, etc. Big, big, big! Digital is big.” We learn, right then, that we will be opening 4 more of these non-scalable and really non-supportable stores very soon, rolling out 10 Starbucks stores with the burn and print technology during my trip to Hawaii the first two weeks of May, and then to 2500 stores before I can use up the rest of my vacation time this year. I coughed up one of the mini-muffins I has just eaten, but no one noticed because they were all panicking also.


So, the digital press conference ends, Sandy and I hook up with Scott and Christine, the other Starbucks people working on this project for us. Scott and Christine have been here working, 24 hours straight, for 4 weeks. They had not slept, eaten, or seen their families since February. Given all that, they look pretty good and seemed to be mentally stable. Much of what they said sounded Japanese however. Very odd.


So the store opens around noon, and throngs of trendy tan people stumble in to be part of the next big digital thing. Everything seems to be going well, so Sandy and I go check into the hotel. It’s a 70 year old Holiday Inn across from Santa Monica pier and the beach.

The hotel was actually cool. They gave us champagne when we checked in. Drunk on champagne I insisted that we put on shorts and go to the beach.


LA was supposed to have a high in the 80’s, but near the water in Santa Monica it was very foggy and very cold. Sandy refused to put on shorts or beach shoes. She wore a new polyester suite and high heals. We walked down to the water, called people on my cell phone and left messages saying we were in LA, it was sunny and warm, and then I held my phone up to the waves so people could hear the surf. I just crack myself up. After a while Sandy started whining that she couldn’t walk in heels in the sand and that it was too cold. I had frost bite on my toes so we walked back to the store. Apparently I was very drunk on champagne, because Sandy says that I kept stopping homeless people and telling them that it was warmer in Seattle.

We got back to the store and ran into James Snook, the Vice-President at Starbucks that owns the relationship with HP. I of course was still wearing shorts and a t-shirt. James commented that I might want to do some tanning before I make another trip to California, then he went back to reading his email.


So we rounded up Scott and Christine, and headed back to the hotel to get changed for the big party. When I found out that I got to go to LA for the opening and party I realized immediately that I had nothing to wear to an “LA party”. I spent several self-esteem-limiting hours trying on black clothes at the Kenneth Cole store in Seattle. Finally I spent $170 on some boring beige slacks and an entirely too tight black shirt. As soon as I got home I knew I could not wear these things out in public. Instead I wore a black Hawaii shirt with some martini glasses on it and my blue turtle pajama bottoms from Old Navy with some black Kenneth Cole sandals. I think I looked fabulous.

Prior to the start of the party there were two concerts out in front of the store. The first was by this annoying Canadian woman named Sarah Harmer. Sarah did several variations on a theme in “Snowbird”, the Anne Murray classic.

Next up came Rufus Wainwright or Dufus Brainwhipe as I call him.
Dufus is either a skinny little 23 year old gay singer / songwriter, or an 11 year old girl. I’m not sure which, but he sings whiney songs about boys and show tunes. He really can’t sing, but he plays the piano OK. He’s big in Japan.


Finally at 8:00 the party started at the nightclub next door called “Gotham”. Tan young people in black, record company people, 300 HP employees from Bangalore. There was an open bar and lots of food. Poor little Dufus Brainwipe was wandering around looking lost and sad. He told me he liked my pajama bottoms. The guy who played “Fish” on Alley McBeal was there. Sandra Tsing Loh was not there .

I was good for about 3 minutes till my self-esteem evaporated. These young trendy people make me feel bad. I hid back in the corner with my coworkers and got drunk.

Around midnight I wandered back to the Holiday Inn. They offered me some more champagne at the door, but I said no. I tried to go to bed, but I was afraid my alarm clock would not go off and I’d miss my plane. Finally at 4am I got up and took a shower. We left at 5:30am for an 8am flight. Our taxi was waiting for us outside. Taxi driver was obsessed with the price of gas and he told us so for the 4 minutes it took him to make it from Santa Monica to LAX by driving 95 miles an hour.

I was hoping to sleep on the plane, but the fucking pilot kept coming over the speakers screaming things.We are now passing over Bakersfield. They have a mall. We are now passing over Fresno, they make raisins here. We are now entering Oregon air space. We are now over Olympia, the state capital of Washington and birthplace of Wayne Newton.”

Finally we landed at Sea-Tac. It was 47 degrees and cloudy. Just like in LA.