If horse racing is the sport of Kings, then polo is for princes
There's some heavy shit going down in my life right now. My biorhythmic strands must be welded permanently together, locked in and tracking the sonic wave patterns of some unheard of speed metal combo who, as yet, have still to secure their first gig, haven't thrown any TV's from hotel rooms and are still waiting to record their first, of many I might add, platinum records.
Some of this heavy shit is for public consumption; some of it isn't just yet. So Saturday afternoon, I'm sitting working on updating the Blogstickers site before I get fired whilst with the other hand I'm trying to revive the patient they call blogtank, who's hanging on in there in the Emergency Room, he's not quite in the pink but he doesn't want to give up and walk into the light just yet.
"That should keep them going for another couple of days" and just as I'm rolling off the surgical gloves my MSN messenger pops up a fresh slice of toast, "You have received a new e-mail message from Christopher Locke" it chirped.
"Hmm, twice in the one week", I thought, encouraged that RageBoy was breaking radio silence again and making further strides into a hopefully prolonged comeback after a period in absentia. The previous EGR in the week was something of a drink at the last chance cafe - an attempt to save his relationship with Laurie in which he desperately urged readers to e-mail her begging her pardon for his incessant bad behavior of late.
But this fresh EGR was shorter than usual. Too short by far and noticeably sans the usual frills not least no sign of the regular "Valued Readers" opener.
London Calling.
Sitting in some x-random Internet cafe in London. None of the usual
bells and whistles, so this may look pretty fonky. I am staying at the
Langham Hilton until the 19th. No laptop, no e-mail, but leave word if
the spirit moves you. It's been moving me all over the map.
Out of character, I love you all without exception. Out of time, I
remain,
Yours,
RageBoy
Far too much detail for this to be just a pointless message from a bored RageBoy. This was a cry for help, the guy was in trouble. Moreover he was in London.
"leave word if the spirit moves you" replayed in my head until I finally decoded it. This was no rhetoric. What should I do? Phone? Nah, it might weird him out too much. Ignore it? Nah, this was for real. So I faxed him, thinking that this would give him enough slack to ponder an offer of companionship long enough to answer it truthfully, thus avoiding the potentially embarrassing, "well I'm kind of busy today but thanks for calling.." phone call.
A couple of hours later at about six o'clock the phone rang. The caller ID showed a London number calling. Shit.
"....that's great Chris, 11 o'clock tomorrow. See you then, you bet!, bye." Double shit. What had I done?
A four-a-side stick and ball game, played on horseback and similar in rules to hockey
So, I have this coping mechanism I use when I find myself in stressful situations. In my job I sometimes get to speak in public to groups of people, often those groups are big enough to be called audiences, sometimes big audiences. I love it, was born to do it. I like to think that I inherited some of my late Grandfather's genes as he used to sing on stage in musicals back in the 40's and 50's in Glasgow which, believe me, is tougher than it sounds.
Anyway, my mechanism. In simplistic terms it's basically downright denial. I kid myself that nothing stressful is going to happen to me, that it's just another regular day.
Usually I'm cool as a cucumber, right up to the point where I stand up, walk on stage or switch on the microphone and at that final point of no return I let myself in on the gig, but by then it's too late to do anything about it. Suddenly plunged head first into the deep-end I'm forced to find my reference points, the (career) survival instinct kicks in, I flick the on-switch and the panic is usually over in a nanosecond and, usually, I perform.
Today would have been just another Sunday but for a notable exception to the absolute norm in that it was our second wedding anniversary. However, before I could get on with spending some quality time with my beloved Fiona, I needed to pop into the centre of London for a couple of hours to meet up with some guy, perhaps get a coffee, nothing major, no big deal.
Highgate, Archway...Kentish Town, Mornington Crescent. The Northern Line was busier than I'd expected for a Sunday morning and I concluded that this was because the London Marathon was being run, literally. Warren Street, my stop. Sunny, 9 degrees, fresh, 10.45, looking good.
Portland Place is a long street and the Langham sits at one end, facing proudly and directly down the street. I turned onto it about 1,000 yards down and as the hotel's majestic profile loomed ever larger on the horizon I decided that it was time to let myself in on the gig.
This was Chris Locke I was meeting here.
"What the...." I whelped. "You gotta be kidding me man. Not RageBoy?! He'll eat me alive for chrissakes. Why didn't you fucking tell me you asshole? Are you out of your fucking mind?". It was clear that I was not a happy camper. "Look" I said as the Langham doorman smiled in a predictable, subservient way, "if I'd told you before now then you know what would have happened, it would have freaked you out so much we wouldn't have got this far. Look, we're here now, it's OK, I'll do all the talking, stay cool."
The game, first played in Persia, 4000 years ago, spread to Arabia, Tibet and the Far East
The Langham Hotel.
Very grand, must be at least a couple of hundred years old, high ceilings, traditional lobby, pillars all over the joint - you know the deal. "Yeah, Hi. I'm meeting one of your guests this morning, a Mr. Christopher Locke?, could you page him for me please?"
I stood back from the counter and paced around anxiously, somehow hoping that my distance would suggest that I was perfectly happy for the receptionist to speak with my intended companion on my behalf and simply announce my arrival. But no. "Good morning Mr. Locke, its Simon at reception, I have a visitor here who would like to speak with you."
No shit, Sherlock!
"Gary? Is that you?" the voice strained. "Yeah, hi Chris, I just got here" I answered.
He replied "Cool, listen I'm still a little wasted from the jet lag and I've just woken up, let me get cleaned up and I'll see you in the lobby in 10 minutes."
Ten minutes pass and he appears and of course I know what he looks like but not him me. "Chris Locke, bloody good to meet you man" as I spring out of my chair. To the surrounding people in the lobby we act like we've known each other for years. Straight to it. What you don't get a sense of, from the limited number of photographs of the guy, is just how tall he is and how bloody long his hair is. He keeps it in check in a pony tail but its gotta be at least half way down his back. Jeans, shirt, hold-all over one shoulder. This guy was the genuine article, a Rebel With A Clue.
"I need a coffee, woke up at 4am and wrote some stuff for a few hours, had breakfast in the 'Memories' restaurant and went back to bed." he growled. In these surroundings he was like a fish out of water. Totally.
Two minutes later we're standing outside Starbucks across the street and wait for a few moments while he finishes a cigarette. Salem Lights.
"So you over here for a few days?", "Well, actually I was supposed to have Laurie here with me but..." he tailed off, shrugging his shoulders in defeat.
It turns out the previous EGR request, you know, the one where he asked readers to e-mail her begging forgiveness for his misdemeanors? Well it kinda backfired which left me feeling more than a little guilty. "Well I sent her an e-mail like you asked", I confessed, but my guilt remained steadfastly intact.
Later inside Starbucks, while we were standing in the queue waiting for our caffeine fixes to be doled out at the opposite end of the counter, he talked a bit more about what an asshole he'd been but that's not for here. Suffice to say the man was hurting.
We set up camp outside and begin to chat.
"Cut! Stop the fucking press! I'm sitting having a coffee with Chris Locke. Excuse me? passer by? yes you, do you know who this guy is? This is Chris fucking Locke!" We were sitting just up from Oxford Circus and quite a number of times open top city tour buses would stop briefly at a the traffic lights whilst we drank our coffees. I imagined the tour guide with the microphone saying "and on your left we have, oh.....RageBoy sitting with some Scottish guy."
I quickly regain my focus back on the conversation but this brief moment of sober realisation was something that was to recur numerous times during our three hours together.
We talked about some initial stuff. I explain why I'm here, that I'm not a stalker, that it sounded like he needed someone to talk to and that, as an EGR Irregular, it was my duty to be there for him. He said he was grateful, of course he was being nice. After the initial pleasantries were over the conversation settled down.
Introduced to India in the 13th century by Muslim conquerors
I asked him about when he first realised he was a writer "I wrote something one day and thought that it just sounded like it was really me talking and not the usual corporate marketing bullshit". Good answer, but I was forgetting that I'd already read about that in Cluetrain AND Gonzo. "For crying out loud..." I scolded myself, "come up with something at least vaguely original and, while your'e at it, quit trying to sound like some shmuck reporter from The London Writers Guild Monthly."
I tried again. He talked about how IBM paid him a load of cash to sit about doing nothing after they put the project they hired him to run on the backburner, "you remember Pointcast? Well this was just like Pointcast only worse, if that could be possible..." He talked about how he had gotten away with this scam for 10 months while they went about their business without his guidance and blew a hundred million bucks. And one day he was being critical of Gerstner to his boss who replied, "Well maybe you should put that in your webzine, Chris?" at which point he realised that EGR was no longer a secret underground 'zine and that RageBoy had finally been connected with him at IBM. He duly left. This was familiar to me, I know this stuff. Again I pushed myself to open up a fresh line of discourse.
So, next up in my shmuck interviewer repertoire, I'm an interviewer for the Beavis & Butthead Fanzine...."Yeah. Boulder, Colorado. Isn't that where Mork & Mindy was set?" Before I could retract the words they were out there. What the fuck was I saying? Here I am shooting the breeze with one of the Web's first and truest visionaries and I'm talking about a kids TV show. This was the first of many bouts of incoherence and babble. I wasn't coping as well as I'd thought I might have.
Chris went on, "Yeah Robin Williams, he's a funny guy. I'm sure he wasn't actually taking anything but he behaved like he was smoking something, but I kinda lost interest in when he made that movie, what was it called?....Mrs Doubtfire.". Mrs Doubtfire. What was I doing? I'll tell you what I was doing, I was only blowing my best and likely only chance to ever connect with Chris Locke on a direct, face to face intellectual level and I was blowing it big time by taking the course of the discussion somewhere south of Disneyland with all this Mork & Mindy crap. At this rate I feared that it wouldn't be long before he wiped his brow, feigning symptoms of jet-lag, made his excuses and retreated back to his Edwardian chamber to get on with his writing.
Frantically attempting to shift focus I started to talk about one of my comedic heroes, Billy Connolly, and how he'd just discovered that one of the many reasons he was so funny, along with living with the effects of having been abused as a child, was that he suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder. This manifested itself on stage in the form of flitting from one story thread to another, and no matter how many tangential layers deep he went, he always made it back to the original point he was trying to make.
"Yeah, I remember feeling that way with pot way back when." Now we're making some progress I thought. He continued, "How you could remember every detail of a conversation with amazing clarity" "Man, I'm in a time warp lately, totally out of time. Wait......is it next month?......no March.......Oh yeah, 18 years ago next month I've been on the wagon, no drink or drugs."
Thank goodness, we were back into Bombast territory. Monkeys. Mecklermedia. Gerstner. Mr Ed.
Polo was brought to England in the 1860's by British soldiers and administrators
I felt understandably obligated to expose a little bit about myself. How I'd been reading tech journals since the age of 12. How I'd been in the tech business since I was 19 after dropping out of college having realised that a programmer I would not make. How I was forced to slug it out in the early days, cold calling with all manner of shit pick up lines and why the only reason I never quit was out of sheer blind competitiveness with my then boss who, I decided, would have to fire me rather than have him enjoy receiving my resignation.
I talked about how I then struck it lucky and, at the age of 21, found myself selling £150k+ entire IT infrastructures to companies who would have had aneurisms had they known they were entrusting their entire futures to some geek kid in a suit who looked older than he really was. For crying out loud, in one organisation I sold systems to the guys who designed surface to air missiles for defence departments all over the world, not a tame WP network for the admin staff, the actual design lab guys. Serious shit. I told him that I never really cut it as a salesman but secretly hankered for a life in marketing, whatever that meant. How we got caught up in the dot com shitstorm two years ago, the brief spell when we were owned by a certifiable dotcom madman, how I emailed copies of Internet Apocalypso to everyone in vain, and lived to tell the tale. How I've stuck with the same software company I joined in '95 and where I've recently weeddled my way into a position of influence from where I can now exact all manner of faux-gonzo-esque behaviour.
Hopefully he was beginning to realise that I wasn't just some kid who'd read a couple of EGR's and simply wanted his autograph. It wasn't Bombast by any stretch, but it was me. We left Starbucks and meandered aimlessly around the streets of London for a bit.
We talked about my weblog and how it was "dicey" to say shit in public that your employers may have difficulty with and how a few guys choose to write under pseudonyms or anonymously to protect their asses. I said that the people I work with knew mainly about the Blogstickers thing and that was all innocent and good natured, but on my personal weblog I tried not to say anything too dangerous or that might get me fired. What he came back with was classic RageBoy, "Man, if I had to stop myself from saying anything dangerous I'd have nothing to fucking say!". Top drawer. He was coming back.
We ended up back outside the Langham hotel and we decided to get some food. He led the way, "You gotta see this fucking place man, The Chukka Bar." The Chukka Bar is a classic British colonial throwback theme bar, only it looked genuinely like it hadn't been decorated for centuries and sits to the left of the lobby in the Langham. It's a veritable museum solely dedicated to Polo, the sport of princes apparently. Saddles, sticks and all manner of Polo memorabilia and history covered almost every square inch of wall. A black piano sat next to the bar tinkling out a note perfect rendition of Celine Dion's Titanic theme song, but the keys moved of their own volition, the piano was on autopilot or something. Titanic, surreal but somehow appropriate.
Steak Sandwich, Grilled sirloin on pesto flavoured and toasted baguette. Coleslaw with horseradish. £11.60
Times two.
By this time we were getting comfortable. It turns out he's here to meet with some people at the BBC and we both agreed that of all broadcast entities, the BBC stands a better than average chance of changing with the times because they're not advertiser funded. "They could do something interesting like getting behind and sponsoring some people with weblogs or something.." This was getting interesting. "I'm meeting with a bunch of guys over there this week.." pointing to the BBC Radio building directly across the street, "Hell, if they even want to pay me to do it then they can sponsor me!". He smiled.
He opened up a little more. He was troubled. Gonzo Marketing hadn't done as well as he'd hoped. Barely weeks after 9/11 the business book market had died on it's ass. Bombast wasn't doing it either. Off the back of the Cluetrain he'd hoped for more success than he was getting. "It kills me to see Gonzo in the business section, but where else can it go?". "I just don't get it when reviewers say that Gonzo is just another conventional business book." According, that was to the Times review carried out by their real estate writer. Eminently qualified. I tried to perk him up and he agreed that things have always gone up and down and every time he's bounced back. He mentioned how much he'd made from the last two, somehow I'd imagined that he'd be high rolling it but it was surprisingly little. We laughed when he recalled how he'd attacked the EGR readers for not buying it in greater quantities.
Next up, amusing stories about the time when Cluetrain was at it's height, how he and David Weinberger had arguments over whose name would appear first on the cover, basically it ended up being Rick Levine's since neither Locke nor Weinberger could live with either Weinberger's or Locke's name going first. I told him my networked markets story, again he was being kind, "That would have been a great story for us to tell back then....".
We shared similar viewpoints on Dvorak and how his development was probably arrested sometime around 1985. That his recent articles slating Cluetrain and blogging had been just cheap shot publicity stunts with no purpose whatsoever. But he was pleased to say that Dave Winer remarked to him that the anti-weblog article didn't register prominently on Daypop's Top 40 when it came out. I added that I couldn't fathom how anyone could sensibly associate Cluetrain with all that dotcom bollocks of two years ago, "I mean, to my mind Cluetrain was the complete opposite to the public perceptions of dotcom for chrissakes, talk about not getting it?" I told him.
"Getting it" or not, depending on your outlook, was something that a lot of people had certainly talked about. He recalled a chapter in Bombast where he and David Weinberger talk about "getting it". Ironically Mr Dvorak had frothed about "not getting it" as an attempted attack on what he perceived as flimsy reasoning on the part of Locke & Co. Well, Dvorak was at least right about something, he just doesn't "get it". Not this 'it' nor many other 'its' I suspect.
Today the sport has a worldwide following although the numbers who can afford to play is limited
The people sitting next to us in The Chukka Bar must have been more than a little bemused at seeing RageBoy, pony tail flailing around. Both of us talking loudly and passionately about all the the above and then tripping carelessly over one subject then another. The Cave paintings at Las Caux, how he'd be more than happy to ask his friend at Fortune Magazine to write about blogtank, how we should get someone like Accenture to sponsor us, why people really keep weblogs, Dave Winer, William Gibson, Blogger, why Hunter S. Thompson should really do something on Polo and that he should take up residence at the Langham just to spend the duration in the Chukka Bar feeding his inspiration as he wrote. We talked briefly about his next book idea on Voice and his misgivings about where it would fit, Sociology? Marketing? and who might actually buy it.
One story after another, bam, bam, bam. "I got a great story about that...." like going the distance with Ali and all the time I'm momentarily flipping out of the conversation and saying to myself "FUUUUUUUUUCCCKKKK" this is RageBoy!!". The invisible pianist started playing the James Bond theme.
Under the circumstances I can see how it could happen. The man and the moment were reducing me to a babbling incoherent who was behaving like he'd never read more than a couple of EGR's, had visited the Cluetrain site at most twice and was barely capable of structuring sentences consisting of more than three random words. More than once I started a sentence that quickly succumbed to faltering inadequacy and mumbling nonsense. It was really embarrassing a couple of times.
Here he was, lost, alone in a foreign land and looking for some much needed spiritual connected-ness and emotional reinforcement. If he couldn't rely on EGR to deliver him from the gates of hell then what hope was there? And who did he get? Me. I don't know, I might have pushed him further back, I sincerely hope not. Whatever, we finished on a high and we stole a menu from The Chukka Bar, from which I've extracted those obscure polo references from the text on the back cover, (and the photo above from the front cover), he found them perversely amusing. I'll keep it as a memento.
So, what do I think now that I've met the man and gotten to know him a little more in person, well as much as you can get to know someone over three hours?
Well I'm convinced more than ever that he's the genuine article, a natural born storyteller as powerful in the flesh as he is in print. But more than that he's a national treasure that should be put on some protected register somewhere. Chris, if you ever get time to read this, please keep on doing what you do and above all, thanks mate. Next time you're in Blighty give me a shout and I'll be better company for you the second time round.
There are a little of 500 registered players in Britain, including the Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Charles, whose exploits on the field at Cowdray Park in Sussex are famous.