The co-founder of iconic New York Mac computer shop Tekserve has died. I learned about Tekserve after I moved to New York from Berkeley in 2014. My new employer, The Intercept, dealt in sensitive files (e.g. from the Snowden archive of NSA documents) and had a healthy paranoia about buying things like laptops online.
Tekserve was very close to our first office on 5th Ave. The Intercept, funded by the founder of eBay, had a very tech startup-y approach to IT: I was told to walk over there and buy whatever I needed. My boss told me they sold to pretty much all the news media outlets in the city.
I opted for a little Macbook Air with an 11 inch screen, maxed out on RAM and flash storage (I think we still called those SSDs). I also bought an NEC MultiSync monitor (27 inches?) since I'd wanted one of those since I was a teenager, and also because my wife's uncle (by then retired) was an NEC sales rep traveling to the U.S. for many years. And an external keyboard and trackpad.
I remember being awed by the size of the store. I also remember distinctly that there was already another Ryan Tate in the database -- I gave them my name and they asked something like, "OK ya you live on <address in Manhattan>?" And I said no, must be a different Ryan Tate, I live in Brooklyn. (I had probably met this other Ryan Tate, probably it was the chef whose SoHo restaurant Savoy I visited right before it closed, maybe two years before all this, on a trip to NYC, and he came out that night to say hello to his name twin.)
It was probably the nicest, smoothest, most informative sales process I've been through at any computer store. I had done the Apple store thing to buy two Macs at this point, it was fine but always a lot of standing around (this has not changed) and at no point did I feel like someone on staff knew more than me about what I was buying. Tekserve flipped that around. It was all very human. I remember something at some point got mixed up about the monitor but they corrected the mistake on the spot.
I did deal with two Mac stores in Berkeley, M.A.C. on University Ave, which was great but much smaller than Tekserve. Actually they are still around it looks like! When I went there, as I recall, they were up a narrow flight of stairs in a second-floor retail space not even a block from the university. Indie Mac stores always felt a bit like pirate operations in the best way, and M.A.C. definitely was part of that aesthetic. I also got my first Mac from the UC Berkeley computer store (do those exist any more?).
I also patronized my friend Thomas Oh's Mac consultancy, Platinum Systems, also based in Berkeley (I can't remember if they ever had an office). He upgraded my Performa 636CD.
Tekserve went out of business in 2016, under pressure from company-owned Apple Stores, including a spectacular-looking one on 5th Ave.
The Apple Stores were an excellent move for Apple and its customers, but I always thought it was crummy and cheap that Steve Jobs' Apple didn't throw a bone to the indie shops that supported the company for decades, including when it was on the ropes. There's a thing I learned about recently called Record Store Day, where recording labels support indie shops with special vinyl releases and deals. There was a half block line out the door of my local record store for this last year. Apple could have had something similar, with some exclusive windows here and there for indie shops on some products or versions of products.
I was recently
one
of 20 people laid off from The Intercept, and one of my sources of
comfort in the wake of that event has been re-watching
Drifting
Clouds, a 1996 film from the
gifted
director Aki Kaurismäki. It portrays a couple who lose their jobs
amid recession in early 1990s Finland. There's a great scene set
at the closing night of a restaurant where
one of the couple
works as head waitress. The
owner
spends her last moments there listening to a band play the
sentimental iskelmä song
Kohtalon
Tuulet, or "Winds of Fate," and watching the aging clientele
dance. Subtitles helpfully translate the wistful lyrics into
English:
My youth is gone, but bitter I never should be
Happiness I was able to feel
With my friends to accompany me
All of our dreams now faded away
Bringing tears to my eyes
The winds of fate took all that away
All of our dreams never fulfilled
When those winds blow over me some day
You will never see me here again
As the band plays its final notes inside the plush and colorful restaurant, the head waitress, from the cold grays of a Helsinki sidewalk, bundles the owner off into a cab. "Thanks for everything, Ilona," says the owner. "And farewell."
"Goodbye manager," says the head waitress.
It is about as moving a depiction as I've seen of the last moments
of a job, of the heartbreaking blend of sentimental humanity and
brutal reality.
But really what sticks with me are the lyrics, and how Kaurismäki
links the "winds of fate," a kind of death, to the end of a job. It's
a perceptive move, because these days our careers feel like a
series of hypotheses about how the world will work — and all of them are eventually smashed.
The Intercept I just left is, for example, one in a series that
were born and died in my seven and a half years there: The editor in
chief who hired me left a few months in and was replaced, the parent
company's business model switched from blogs to streaming video, the
publication went from for-profit to nonprofit, we housed and then
relinquished the
Snowden
archive, the staff grew and
shrank,
the focus evolved.
Another provocative media company where I used to work, in the same building as The Intercept, was profitable and thriving until one day it ended up bankrupt because its reporting angered the wrong billionaire.
The couple in Drifting Clouds
persevere, even as the setbacks pile up to comical heights, and with
some merciful good luck create a new start for themselves. Similarly,
change in the media business has done me more favors than harm. When I
started college, my expected career track was
to start at a small newspaper and hop to a series of progressively
larger ones, earning a pittance along the way. By the
time I graduated there was an explosion of web publications, then blogs, then digital media juggernauts like BuzzFeed and Vox, nonprofit investigative publications like Pro Publica and The Intercept, then the micro-nonprofits, and now further atomization into the likes of Substack and Patreon-supported publishers. I find these new vistas invigorating.
I'm
on
record as saying that some post-me Intercept is going to be the
best yet, but I'm still proud of the ones I was a part of. My
colleagues there (and the contractors and freelancers I worked with)
were unbelievably talented and generous human brings, and thanks to
them my teams
Yes, the "winds of fate" eventually blew over me, and I got bundled
into my metaphorical cab. That was the price of being able to work
at a fearless investigative online magazine with the kindest and most capable coworkers I've ever encountered, and it was absolutely
worth it. At some point I'll figure out what comes next; hit me up
on LinkedIn! In
the meantime I'm enjoying some much-deserved beach time with my
family this summer, which thankfully comes with some much nicer
winds (and sadly not any
iskelmä).
Before she died last month, Renée French was a nurse at New York Presbyterian Columbia Hospital. At some point before that, she rendered an unforgettable performance in downtown indie film icon Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes as herself, or at least a version of herself with the same name, leafing through a gun magazine in a restaurant. She was poised and smoldering, gracefully insisting, to a persistently helpful waiter, that she be left alone to simply drink her coffee. “I really wish you hadn’t done that,” she says at one point, as he pours an unsolicited refill. “I had it the right color, the right temperature — it was just right.”
Coffee and Cigarettes was released in 2004, but French’s scene was shot some time during the preceding 18 years, during which Jarmusch filmed the movie’s 11 distinct stories. It’s not clear how much acting she subsequently did; IMDB lists just one other performance credit. Presumably, French might have found more work had her performance in Coffee been released sooner. (Jarmusch did try to do so, at one point reportedly nearing a deal to showcase the shorts on MTV before concerns about glorifying smoking scuttled things.)
After Jarmusch memorialized French on his Instagram, photographer Stephen Torton wrote about her recent life, saying in a comment, “Renee was a single mom and a front line nurse who died after months of near round the clock work.“ Another commenter wrote, “ She helped my mom when she was at her lowest during the
peak of this pandemic. I’ll be forever grateful for her compassion and
love for helping others.” French was a longtime New Yorker, and other friends remembered her working at and patronizing various downtown bars in the 1990s. “She cared about fellow humans,” one wrote. Jarmusch remembered her as “a truly rare and remarkable human being... kind, selfless, beautiful.”
It’s clear, in other social media posts, that French was grappling with the emotional toll of her work. At one point she wrote, as the pandemic waned, “I am struggling coming out of this ‘dream’.” Another time: “Just wanna have a few drinks and SLEEP.“
In the week and a half since I learned of French’s death, my thoughts have repeatedly returned to her. I saw Coffee for the first time maybe a month ago, part of a Jarmusch binge that began in March, as the city began its move indoors. In her work we see that peace is necessary for compassion, that providing solitude is as much an act of love as active care. I wish as a city and community we could have provided Renée with more of these things, and looking at what we together have gone through, and what many brave people have fought for, these last few days, I think they clearly are also needed by our most vulnerable citizens. Let people alone to live in peace, to care for others and to pursue happiness.
The past two days in New York, with the spring snowstorm and
glorious aftermath, have been among the most beautiful since I
moved to New York in 2014. (And I’m pretty bad at capturing on my
iPhone how stunning Park Slope looks this morning.)
There are many reasons the payroll tax break San Francisco extended to Twitter was horrid public policy; here's just one: San Francisco is a high cost, high service city in the mold of New York.
It's a premium product, albeit not as premium as Gotham -- the transit and nightlife are inferior, for example, and it's not dense enough. But then SF's payroll tax rate is less than half that of New York's personal income tax. You get what you pay for.
San Francisco, then, should not be trying to compete on cost with dreary suburbs like San Bruno, where Twitter threatened to relocate. Doing so just leaves less money to maintain the services that make SF unique (to say nothing of improving them). And it's a losing game besides. There will always be a cheaper location than SF.
It's especially bizarre that San Francisco supervisors caved to Twitter and handed over a $22 million tax break at the precise moment the city's cosmopolitan advantages are finally pushing it past the unremarkable cities clustered around Stanford University.
San Francisco is becoming Silicon Valley. The city used to be seen as not part of the Valley. But Twitter, Zynga, Square, and our most successful companies from YC — Airbnb and Dropbox — are all there.
The biggest problem I'm seeing our graduates having is the problem of hiring. The main demographic they seek is engineers in their 20s and those guys want to live in San Francisco. The majority of YC grads head to the city now.
Well, the startup geeks at Hacker News say they like "not driving -- I work at Dolores Labs and live 5' away." They also like "having options when I don't feel like working. I can walk to the park where beautiful girls do non-programming things like laughing while blowing bubbles! I can go get a beer and watch a movie. I can walk and grab a quick bite at taqueria cancun. I can go to a club. I just love the energy and excitement here."
For the record, payroll taxes like those dodged by Twitter are what pay for parks with beautiful girls, mass transit to avoid driving, etc.
Then there's this, also from Taggar:
Besides, in my opinion, if you have a social product, it's really important to live amongst your users. For example, if I were building an app to target bartenders to help them build their own brands, I would want to be in San Francisco, not the Valley."
Being closer to users and customers; exploiting the rise of urban-centric mobile tech; attracting young talent; proximity to a diverse array of non-tech experiences -- these also happen to be the very things said to be combusting New York's "exploding" tech scene.
<Just for the record again: When the economic meltdown sent its budget into a tailspin, New York's business savvy Republican mayor knew exactly what to do. And it didn't involve issuing a crony capitalism groupon to a lavishly overfunded "business" with no plan for generating revenue. Bloomberg maintained the quality of his offering. New York didn't get on its knees and neither should San Francisco.
Mia Doi Todd, My Room Is White (Flying Lotus remix)
@Ryan Tate, the next time you’re walking down a New York street
Sure, this is a nice track, but there’s also a timeless moral to the story: You catch more Anderson Cooopers with electronic nightclub music than with straight folk.
"Goodbye manager," says the head waitress.
I'm
