I’m listening to The Week In Startup and I’m flabbergasted in the mentality of Jason Calacanis and Molly Wood. I think some of my shock comes from something we don’t talk about a lot in America — class. They’re both really, really rich and so of course they would rather think up ways to screw over workers rather than pay people more.
A lot of America’s problems come from income inequality. If we would just tax billionaires out of existence and pay the average person a living wage then I think a lot of our problems would be dramatically mitigated.
But that’s just not what’s going to happened.
We’re going to use, on a macro basis, automation and AI to destroy a wide range of jobs that we assume will always be there. Off the top of my head, I find myself worried about the 3 million high paying transportation jobs that will vanish whenever Elon Musk hooks AGI to an EV semi.
One thing that was touched upon during This Week In Startups is that as long as what AI does is “just good enough” then it will be used. If you hook up AI to androids then virtually overnight the need for a Universal Basic Income is going to become clear.
A UBI solves a lot of problems and yet it would also cause a lot of problems. Most people are lazy and they just won’t do shit if they get a UBI. What’s worse, there are also people who are extremely ambitious and they would demand the right to have SOME job, just to be able to have somewhere to go during the day and have some sense of self-fulfillment. So, it seems as though some sort of “value added” stipend would be included in which if you can do some sort of job that AGI can’t do very well then you will extra momney.
Or something.
The point is — I’m really worried about America’s instability going forward because of income inequality. There seems as though there might be a real risk of the “Petite Singularity” causing a huge pushback involving the rise of neo-Luddites.
These neo-Luddites will demand huge carve outs whereby only humans can do some jobs. Only time will tell.
Editor’s Note: I wrote this a really long time ago for ROKon Magazine in Seoul. I still think it’s one of the better things I’ve written over the years. — LSB
Mary DuMont and Myke Holliday before his death.
My first encounter with Mary DuMont was indirectly. Long before I met her in person, I experience the hailstorm of buzz amongst the expats I know in Seoul coming back from the Anmyeondo Beach Party last year. The more I learned about Anmyeondo and the story behind it, the more interested I became.
Months later, at a party held by Dennis Mitchell at his absolutely fabulous studio apartment in Hywha, I found myself talking to Mary. There was definitely…something about Mary. The older we get, the more difficult it is for those around us to not be just another brick in the dusty stonewall we call reality. But she seemed different. Her presence was a dollop of techno-color. “Who is that woman?” I thought when I first entered the room. I soon met Mary and her friend Joel. The two of them seemed to have a special relationship — like they’d be through a lot together. Mary and I flopped down on the couch and started to talk. Just as I was getting ready for a evening of flirtatious, wine-induced banter, the bomb was dropped.
She was a widow.
Not in the traditional sense, but a widow nonetheless. While currently she had a boyfriend — one of the more famous DJ’s in Korea, natch — her previous boyfriend, Myke, had died tragically and suddenly from cancer about a year before. I felt a bit of an existential chill. I was a character in the coda, the epilogue of a story that was on the cusp on ending. I found myself wanting to be a major character in whatever story was about to begin.
I mentioned to her the movie seemed to fit her situation perfectly — Moonlight Mile. The movie is a bittersweet, melancholy reflection on the effects of losing someone love suddenly and its after effects. Since we first met, I have frequently found myself thinking about her lost. I loved something a great deal, it was only a magazine, not a person, and I lost it, too. There is a reason they say that “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The thing that great loss provides you with is understand of the need, the power of compassion towards your fellow humans.
Since we first met, Mary has been just on the edge of my universe. She inhabits some magical land of DJs and cool kids where nerdy street urchins such as myself are allow to visit, but never live. Ever since my ROKon Magazine days, I have talked to her about doing a story about Myke. The more I got to know her, though, the more I realized the story is not so much about Myke as it is his effect on her. Myke seems ever-present with her, as though he’s just over her shoulder in her mind.
“I hated it here when I first arrived in March of 2004,” Mary says. “The people did not excite me and the superficialities that seem to be put in front of much bigger problems irritated me in amazing ways. Unsurprisingly, the more I settled, it became easier for me to want receive a culture so distant from my own.”
Before too long, Mary says, she found herself hearing about a fellow called Myke Holliday.
“I met him in the midst of a drunken night in Itaewon whilst waiting for my friends to grab a Kebab from the ‘Kebab guy’ I was shocked at the notion that this Myke Holiday standing before me, who didn’t make much effort to say hi at the moment, was the boyfriend of the ‘beautiful girl’ who worked behind the bar in the biggest club in Hong Dae, M2,” she said. “‘Who is this Myke Holliday?’ ‘Why I am always hearing his name scattered around town?’ At this point I had no recognition that he was a party planner and promoter. I didn’t really care either… “
Mary says later, their relationship would become more intense.
“My world revolved around his life, but I loved every second of it,” she says. “It’s so strange really, in the beginning he had small annoyances that I didn’t expect my heart to absorb. Not too long after getting involved, I was so empowered by this new love and life I was living. It was fun, exciting, and different. I was so devoted to him. Nothing else in my life seemed to take on as much meaning anymore. We always joked about being married from the very beginning. He would tell his friends “Mary will only marry me if it’s on a small island off of Greece. I’ll have to buy her a Vera Wang dress.. “
In the summer of 2005, Mary and Myke decided to organize another Anmyeondo party. It’s funny that something that seems such a important part of the expat experience in Korea is actually just a few years old.
“We began organizing it June and spent our Sundays in Anmyeondo,” she said. “We used to stay out all night Friday and Saturday promoting and then go straight to Nambu Bus Terminal and wait for the first bus to Anmyeondo at 7am. I learned so much from Myke. First and foremost, he taught me music. Myke had over 200 records (all of which were later given to me) and when he was at work, I would listen to the records he talked about and I would experiment on his decks.”
The 2005 Anmyeondo beach party was named Soulshine Summer Groove, 2005. Mary says that another foreigner, James from Australia, helped to organize and promote it. Myke would tell Mary and James what needed to be done.
“It was all brand new to me, but very very exciting,” Mary says. “Now that I look back, I didn’ t play such an important role on the organizing, but man did I think I did at the time. Myke taught me everything he knew about promoting. He used to always say “It’s all about getting people excited! that’s all promoting is.'”
The 2005 party did not go as well as Myke and Mary had expected, however. They failed to take into account a very important aspect of doing something on the beach — high tide. “We actually talked about it loads and thinking about it, we did take it into account. However, the problem was that we trusted a source and we went with it,” she said. It turns out the tide went up much higher than the source had said. There was a moment of panic, but ultimately some very expensive equipment was saved from destruction.
“It was crazy! I remember being so ashamed and embarrassed and Myke just laughed and continued to have an amazing time,” Mary says. “The party pretty much ended at 3am that night, but the music continued again in the morning. That’s one think about Myke, he always believed when no one else did. That was what was so great about him. He never let anything get to him…”
On the way to Thailand to recover from planning the part, they talked about the future. The two of them realized they wanted the same thing — a simple life back in the States. “He didn’t have a strong family background so the idea of genuine love was so appealing to him. He had grown up in Korea since he was 16. His father left when he was 18. Myke didn’t see him again until he got sick. He spent almost 9 years growing up in Seoul alone. He had loads of friends, but mainly just party friends. I think he starved for genuine love which is what I gave him… my family too.”
That didn’t work out, however, and they found themselves planning another festival the next year, the Anmyeondo Music Festival 2006. It was set to be a huge event, with international DJs descending upon Korea for the weekend event. Among them was InFusion, one of the best known DJs in the world.
This part of the story I learned face to face at the apartment Mary shares with her boyfriend. It reminds me of one I might see back home in Richmond. Mary brought out an assortment of teas for me to choose from. She pulled out a few pictures of her as a model in a lot fashion magazine. I thought back over the times I’ve seen her in the past. One image that stands out is seeing her with a brown ‘fro wig backstage of the big DJ event that took place on the Han River recently. The expression on her face as she watched makes the imagine iconic and leaves me wishing I’d taken a picture of it.
Mary says Myke had been complaining of abdominal pains for some time as we sip our tea. Whenever he went to a Korean doctor, they told Myke it was just too much spicy food. Myke finally went to an American service hospital to get a full check up. Throughout the experience, Mary stresses, Myke was the most positive person one could be.
It was July 6th, 2006, a Thursday, when he found out.
“He called me at work,” Mary said. The doctors said he had a tumor on his liver and it was inoperable. “That night, I didn’t stay at his house,” Mary says with a bit of sadness in her voice. Things went very quickly at that point. By July 10th, his father, Tom had come to Korea to be with him.
“By the end of July, he was in a lot of pain,” Mary said. “He was in so much pain, I didn’t know what to do.”
In the final days, Myke left the hospital and went to a hospice to die. Looking back, Mary says she has a few regrets she didn’t stay more with him while he was in the hospital. At the time, Mary says, she was so worried about her job that she didn’t stay over night. “Why was I so concerned about losing my visa,” she asks out loud.
As the days flew by, Myke “started to hate the doctors,” says Mary. Mary says she worried as the days went on that he might die without her being there. “I was so worried about that every sing night,” she said. In the end, however, she was there with him when he died at ahospice in Bundang, on July 24, 2006. He was 26.
She was determined, after his death, however, to see some sort of music event take place on the Anmyeondo Beach. Thus, with the help of some friends — most specifically well-known Haybonchon resident Hoppe — Mary was able to organize a new event that year, in honor of Myke. The called “Anmyeondo Beach Party 2006, A Tribute to Myke Holliday,” was a way for her to honor Myke’s memory in a way he would appreciate.
“I never had time to mourn,” Mary says of the time between Myke’s death and the beach party. “It was a tribute. this was his party. Everyone in Seoul knew it. It was his party.”
While there were numerous problems, Mary ultimately believes the party she and Hoppe organized was a success. “There were so many things that Myke wanted to do that he never got to do,” Mary said.
Mary says she learned a great deal about many different things due to Myke’s untimely death. She says it has put her life in perspective. She now knows to focus on the people who are really important in your life. “There are so many things that you don’t realize until you have an experience like this,” Mary said.
These days, Mary has her eyes on the future. She is taking online university courses and would like to snag a marketing job somewhere in the United States. “I don’t want to stay in Korea too long,” she notes.
I often see Mary around these days. She’s always got a smile on her face. Mary says there won’t be a Anmyeondo Beach Party this year and that saddens me greatly. I keep thinking of how determined she looked backstage at the DJ festival on the Han as her boyfriend played. My heart tells me that she was thinking about Myke and how his dreams will come true through her hard work.
We all want to believe in something. I guess I want to believe in Mary.
It’s really beginning to sink in that I’m nothing more than an old loser at this point and I need to be more aggressive when it comes to having more than one creative track. My looming 50th birthday is really rattling my cage. I have a very, very narrow window of opportunity to make something of myself before I’m not just an old loser, but an elderly loser.
As such, I’m going spend a few hours every day rooting around the other story concepts I’ve been thinking about for some time. Instead of just being absolutely focused on my first novel, I’m going to force, force myself to think outside the box.
The aim is, of course, that if I have more than one story to pitch agents then that increases my very slight odds of getting published before I’m too old to realize what’s going on.
But it’s a fine balance. I have to keep my focus on this first novel enough that I can continue to build on the momentum I’ve built up with it. I can’t grow so distracted that I don’t get anything done at all.
The great irony would be, of course, that ultimately I get one of these scifi novels I have rolling around in my mind published first after working so hard on this mystery-crime-thriller. Ugh. But at least I will get published in some way before I get dementia and am alone and bitter in a nursing home with no one to come visit me.
Man, does getting old suck. I have a very, very finite amount of time left to me on this planet and every day I continue to be a fucking loser, the less time I get to enjoy the “cool stuff” of whatever success I might ultimately have.
I was very creative in Seoul.
It’s all very frustrating.
One thing I might want to do if I ever become any sort of success is write picture books for children. I did an amazing job of writing little, short stories for Korean children learning English when I was in Seoul for the children’s newspaper I wrote for and I would love to do it again at some point.
But it’s just not practical for me to look into it at the moment — I would need an illustrator to work with and at the moment I live in something of a vacuum. So, being able to write little children’s books would be a side effect of a broader success.
Ugh. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I hate being an old loser. I have just wasted way, way too much time grieving over the failure of ROKon Magazine. All I can do, I guess, is try to bootstrap myself out of this particular situation.
Only time will tell how successful I am at it all.
I have, in the past, been a regular listener to the ScriptNotes podcast and when I heard that one of the hosts, Craig Mazin didn’t “get” the cultural and emotional significance of flowers….I was like “what the what?” I even went so far as to suggest that Mazin “didn’t have a soul.”
Now, with the advent of the spectacular third episode of The Last Of Us, I think I may have to eat some crow. Despite Mazin’s distaste of flowers (of all things) the man can write a heartfelt story.
Which makes me wonder what his psychology might be. For me, the simple enjoyment of flowers is a basic element of the human existence. And, yet, with both Chernobyl and The Last of Us, Mazin has proven that one can not like flowers and still have a “soul.”
Now that it’s February 1st and I have a looming 50th birthday just days away, I need to give myself more structure. I read a very depressing tweet from a woman who apparently has struggled for years to get a literary agent.
So. I think what I need to do is take a deep breath and start to carve out some time each day to work on something OTHER than the novel I’m working on. I finally know how *I* develop and write a novel and, as such, the next creative project(s) that I work on SHOULD go a lot faster.
Hopefully.
As such, I need to back up and buckle down. I need to read, use my Netflix account more and double down on working every day on something other than my first novel. I have two or three really solid scifi concepts rolling around in my mind and I think every day, no matter what, I need to spend a few hours on either those scifi novels or some other novel in the six novel project I’ve been working on.
I’ve finally reached a stable enough moment in this first novel that I can focus on working on something else with all this free time I have. These halcyon days are not going to last forever — and I’m not going to live forever, natch — so it’s put up or shut up time.
Oh boy. Now that I’ve gotten past the struggle of the first few chapters of the second draft of this novel, I can now begin to think seriously about giving the novel to beta readers at some point in the near, near future.
It’s going to be a real pain in the ass.
But, as I used to say during the ROKon Magazine era, “every problem is just a opportunity in disguise.” So, as such, I’m going to have to be a beta reader for other people so they’ll be my beta reader. This is point in the process when, to a certain extent, things are out of my hands.
So, it could be a few months before I get any feedback on the second draft. As such, I’ve decided to really take more seriously the idea of working on a second and third “creative track” so I work on those novels while I wait for people to get back to me about the beta draft.
I’m growing alarmingly close to my 50th’s birthday so…I need to put up or shut up on the actually getting closer to the process of querying. It could be as early as this fall and it could be as late as about a year from now.
While I generally have a very blase view on most things sexual, on a macro societal basis, I find myself growing just a bit alarmed at the rise of hot lesbians. These are women who are traditionally attractive but have decided to play for the other team, as it were.
Fletcher
Now, I validate their right to be lesbians and the whole “hot” part is equally a lulz, but…what is going on? Why would growing numbers of traditionally attractive women decide that they would rather date women? Or, I suppose a better question would be — why are lesbians deciding to dress in a way that makes them hot to men? Or is that just a side-effect of something I don’t understand.
Given that I don’t anything about anything, I suppose the last possibility is the most likely. I suspect I’m overthinking things. Lesbians want to be hot, too, and maybe even though they’re thinking of the female gaze, the way they’re doing it is mistaken by idiots like me as being “hot” in a heteronormative manner.
As an aside, I have to say that that very hot lesbian Fletcher leaves me at a loss. While I like her persona and her music, the more I listen to her stuff the more of an Old I feel. It seems very “of the moment” in a way that makes it very specific and niche.
Or, it could be, I’m just old and out of touch.
I hate being old. Anyway, there’s a good 10,000 word New Yorker piece to be written about the rise of “hot lesbians” and What It All Means especially in the context of the “woke cancel culture mob.” Scott Galloway seems like the type of person who would write it, too.
I’ve gotten into something of a rut when it comes to this novel. As it becomes more and more clear that there is going to be a lengthy post-production process, I have to start working on a few other novels so I can bounce back and forth between projects as things progress.
It’s just really difficult for me to do this. And, yet, I have to do it. I have to give myself a more structured life so I can read, use my Netflix account and work on a novel (or a screenplay?) other than this one novel I’ve been working on for ages and age.
In hindsight, I half regret not at least looking more into writing a screenplay. But I fear that moment has passed. Plenty of people my age in showbiz have a 20 year career behind them of writing screenplays by the time the reach my age. Ugh. Here I am, struggling with the second draft of my first novel.
I hate being a late bloomer. It sucks.
What I have to, at a minimum, is get more aggressive fleshing out the other proposed novels in this projected six novel project. I keep weighing different ways I could eliminate a novel or two, only to realize I really, really want to explore each story that each of the six novels is expected to tell.
So, lulz. Back to six novels.
But I also have a number of really strong scifi novels rolling around in my mind and I think I’m going to start being more aggressive about fleshing them out.It would be, of course, very ironic, if I spend all this time writing a mystery-thriller and my first published novel is one of these really strong scifi novels I want to work on.
Some 30 years ago, the character Michael Stedman on thirtysomething said that it was official, he was “invisible to teenage girls.” Well here I am as I’m about to have my 50th birthday and twentysomething young women are actively going out of their way to avoid me.
That horrible creature on the right is me these days.
I was having dinner last night and I noticed that I waitress was attractive and I made it clear I was looking forward to talking to her as she served me. That did not go over well. She must have got spooked that some creepy old dude wanted to talk to her, because she got switched out of having to be my waitress. The replacement waitress made up some bullshit excuse, but it was clear what had happened.
Ugh.
So, here I am, daydreaming about how I’m going date hot little numbers once I Make It Big and, lulz, in reality I can’t even get a cute young waitress to be around me. This is doing wonders for my self-esteem, let me tell you.
I suppose the case could be made that once I’m some huge, bestselling author the context of me being and old coot will change and cuties will be able to overlook what a horrible oger I’ve apparently transformed into in recent years. But I think one thing I have to realize is I don’t like what I used to do. I’m now an Old and, as such, I have to start to realize what I might look like in the eyes of young people.
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