https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...
What a lovely article. A lot to learn from that old man. I quoted a few things, for the HN crowd (myself included) that often reads comments and seldom reads articles:
>He’s also a youthful, gentle man glowing sans peur et sans reproche while bringing a moment of grace, manners and style to largely impolite, undignified and profane times. That’s why people, even the known and confident, seek admission to his court, to be touched by politesse: Because he’s an escape, a salve that somehow, just for a moment, delivers us from what’s out there, which is harsh and threatening. Or as friend and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik says: He is our perception of the ideal grandfather. Or how grandfather would be if he left grandmother home. “People . . . ask to meet Irving just so they can say they had at last met a man who has it all figured out,” says Gopnik, now living in Paris. He sees Link as a true California type as much as any snazzy actor or wealthy courtesan. “He puts me in mind of some great performance piece. Irving is his own creation.”
...
>Yet Link’s daily ritual hasn’t gone away. He walks two miles from home each morning to the hotel, for granola, bananas and berries over The Times and the trades. One cup of decaf. Then onto Wilshire and Camden and Little Joe’s barbershop, where little Giuseppe Bausoue (“I make house calls to Frank Sinatra”) coiffures, blow-dries and sprays Link’s pearl-white hair into a stiff sculpture. Max, chauffeuring the hotel’s black Rolls-Royce, has Link back at the Peninsula around 9:30 a.m. Upstairs to the spa, into a terry robe and slippers, and out to a cabana for the first of dozens of incoming and outgoing phone calls. Maybe a turkey sandwich lunch alongside the pool where tans are oiled umber, cellular phones tinkle incessantly, and nobody swims. Usually there’s gin rummy twice a week, Fridays and Sunday, for 5 cents a point. Sometimes dinner at Drai’s. But always the framework of a permanent schedule. “Call me a creature of habit,” suggests Link. He doesn’t drive, doesn’t move far from the Peninsula, doesn’t shock his system with unfamiliar experiences, doesn’t get close to people who converse in negatives. “That creates stress, which is the root of bad health. A routine means I don’t worry about what I have to do this afternoon, or should be doing later in the week, or must get done by next month. “That way, I hope to live to 100.”
...
>“Everything went,” Link says. “I sold our home and our properties and moved into an apartment in Santa Monica.” But he did have the support of a wife and his children. “They knew that in both cases I had done the right thing,” he says. “So I really couldn’t have cared less what other people thought. I didn’t mind eating at McDonald’s.” He picked up new work as a $15,000-a-year public relations spokesman for National Distributing Co., his brother-in-law’s liquor business. At 64, for the first time in his adult life, Link was working for someone else; a hired hand, a salaried employee. “That was the saddest point of my life,” he says. “What I really cared about was what I had done to myself and my reputation and my self-respect. I could find excuses. I could come up with explanations. But deep down I knew. I blamed myself.”
...
>Believe part of that. Friends suggest that engineering something for nothing today is a smart way of setting up deals for tomorrow. It has to do with quid pro quo, creating allegiances, issuing markers. Link is aware of his gift: “You approach this business the way you approach life. Positively. With a sense of fun, with humor, and with a certain amount of mental creativity. “But if you aren’t sincere and are involving yourself with perceptive people who know facts from bull----, then you’ve created a negative. Then your deal’s off.”
...
>Link gets a 10-minute coif, stiff enough to last until July.
...
>“You have the impression that [Link] irons his socks and gets dressed in the middle of the night just to go to the bathroom,” Davis says. “I think he truly believes in the saying that anybody will be in good spirits and good temper if they’re well dressed.”
...
>“I miss the past to a degree,” he muses. He’s drinking Evian at lunch and saving his one Chardonnay for dinner. “But I’ve adjusted to what exists now. I’ve learned to prefer the day I’m living in. If you don’t grow with the times, you grow old with the past.”
...
>Link has tallied his life. Its rewards are “family and friends who have supported me, loved me, cared for me.” The price has been no higher than “always giving a little more than you get.”
This paragraph threw me off. The author goes on to quote Davis about Link - so I suppose the second sentence is to meant to be rhetorical and for effect, as in "is the sky blue?"
https://patrickdowns.photoshelter.com/image/I0000Hbr_mkY_p2A
that's the way!
It's funny how much life cycles. I do kinda remember a phase where people were eating a "healthier" breakfast of some kind of fruit, and when granola became popular, and when milk fat was considered the worst thing you could do to your body.
But now eggs are fine, again. Great, even.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4632449/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/19...
The margarine section of the dairy case was bigger than the butter section. Imitation cheese slices were sold right alongside regular processed cheese - they're now completely dairy free and banished to the vegan food section.
There's a famous scene in "Sleeper" (1973) by Woody Allen where the character wakes up in the future to find out that everything that was considered bad for you is considered good for you again. Woody Allen was born in 1935 so had been around long enough to know these things go in cycles.
We would need something like LD50, or even better a range over a period (eggs are mostly fine if you eat between 2 and 5 per week)
- Too much Vitamin A
- Too much protein (yes, there is such a thing)
- 1450kcal from eggs alone (might be ok but other nutrients are needed)
Even before touching the fats.
What the... he'd leave his wife at home with the kids while he hung out all day at the pool with "magnificent-looking young women, full of theatrical drive" and eat all his meals at the hotel?
His job, or at least his former jobs, paid well enough to have a home in Beverly Hills, drive a gold lexus, and wear beautiful suits every day.
So they weren't necessarily estranged - he just worked long days every day that afforded a very nice lifestyle.
Some people do work jobs where affluence and a nice lifestyle are kind of baked into it.
I do know quite a few people who travel for work often, they stay in luxury hotels, business class travel, great food and fun opportunities at a often basis.
You need to get lucky with the job you do.
So they were effectively separated most of those years. Just informally so.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...
At the viewing I noticed how it looked quite distinctly worn.
Like, the ceiling above the stove was full of grease from frying and the interior of the oven had clear signs of only being used for frozen pizzas. Looked like he'd only ever made like pork chops or frozen pizzas.
The floor in the main bedroom was very well preserved, except for a noticeable worn path leading to the bed and a small oval next to the bed. Similar things in the living room.
I mentioned this to the agent, which replied: *Oh yeah, the guy bought the place so he could stay here when he needed a break from his wife. Apparently he'd come here every few weeks or so and stay for a couple of days."
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/irving-lin...
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/pressdemocrat/name/rand...
Just imagine Peter Falk and Link conversing next to that pool: https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/travel/discover/photos...
maybe I'm just nostalgic, but there's an essential dynamic in the story that isn't present in the culture now.
the hotel was a place with durable meaning that cohered in the culture over a long period of time. I couldn't name one place now that isn't just a theme park to its former meaning, full of toursts taking selfies, people who themselves know they don't belong somewhere. the thrill of taking photos of themselves or their food is the same as they might get from shoplifting a lip balm. maybe what's changed in the culture is the people lack belonging and go from place to place like this stealing bits of meaning without their lives becoming any richer, or particularly less poor.
the physical places themselves didn't change, but I think the identity of people who use places to tresspass and share with their imaginary followers somewhere else has hollowed out the presence and meaning of these places, and that is what has made characters with romantic and interesting lives like this Irving guy something from the past. maybe people just don't act like they belong anymore.
As opposed to this monster of minutia that is one life, Moon traveled the back roads and collectively met hundreds of people and made conversation, gathered famous and obscure lore of the places he visited. He encountered them on their own turf and elsewhere. Even a chance meeting by a lake with a mosquito-bitten teenage runaway girl who opened up to him about the awful life from which she had just fled, and he made the 'courageous' decision to drive her across Wisconsin and deliver her safely to her grandmother's house in Green Bay.
He is essentially a documentarian, and delivers the plain truth of the tales told to him. It is a transformative read.
In my experience it is multiple traits that people open up to. Zero judgement, approachability, interest, friendliness and non-gossipy/tight-lipped about sensitive information.
Most people present as judgemental. It's hard not to appear judgemental, and it's even harder not to be judgemental. I love non-judgemental people, and have managed to collect a few (mostly female) as friends. One or two get told the most intensely personal stuff
Then I saw the year of publication: 1993.
I assume that plenty of university students find their way to HN still. And that many of them will have been born around the mid-2000’s.
I only barely make the cut myself to having been born a few years before 1993.
“My story begins on the Lower East Side of New York,” he said...⸻
1. This is generally considered the pinnacle of literary short fiction publishing.
2. He was, of course, being ironic (and bitterly jealous). As an aside, the movie is a brilliant dark comedy, written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait who’s come a long way from his Police Academy days.
It's not a magazine about a city. The first few pages DO remain "Goings On About Town," but that's a fraction of the page count.
I have the February 10th issue on my desk right now, actually. The long articles in this one are:
- A discussion of an unusual development in a high-rise condo
- A long article by MacArthur winning music critic Alex Ross (ie, not the comics artist of the same name) on Alma Mahler-Werfel
- A piece on the struggle of the US Military to keep recruiting up ahead of ordinary depletion
- An article on the pursuit of an artificial blood substitute
Incidentally, if you're interested in modern classical music at all, Ross' book THE REST IS NOISE is pretty great.
It’s a well-written piece by a professional journalist, published in a magazine that people were willing to pay money for. It stands out against the kind of ad-supported click-optimized dreck that passes for journalism today.
"... <name of city> (that is 275 km west of here) ..."
which only makes sense when you are in their offices/city.
>Ultimately, his story is a poignant meditation on the inevitability of change and the enduring power of tradition.
>Ultimately, his story is a trite and shallow distraction which fails to leave a lasting impression upon the reader.
A fun experiment would be to ask your favorite AI
"Find me a recent article that is not worth reading and has no worthwhile journalistic, philosophical, emotional, or any other kind of takeaways."
My point being that for a story like this the journey is more important than the destination.
TIL that my last 30+ years of egg eating has been a faux pas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Ag...
So it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek jab at contemporary cultural mores.
It was a very informative time for me personally.
I can't wait (seriously, not sarcasm) to tell my wife about this.
do people not eat eggs anymore?
Except there really weren't studies, and this is why the nutrition "science" was so bad back then. A sibling comment mentioned a study in rabbits and points out the obvious problems with making conclusions based on a herbivore, but the general belief was that since high blood cholesterol was linked with heart disease, eating a lot of cholesterol is bad for you.
When they actually did to the studies, they found that the vast majority of people do not get high blood cholesterol from (reasonable amounts of) dietary cholesterol. There are apparently a small subset of people (like 5% or so) who are particularly sensitive to dietary cholesterol though.
That was why nutrition science in the 80s/90s should be such a cautionary tale. So much of it was bad science, or more charitably there were "reasonable" hypotheses that were presented as government-sponsored "facts" that turned out to be false when they were actually tested.
The article is from 1993, not today.
I wasn’t around in 1993 but I’m pretty positive my parents and grandparents ate eggs in 1993.
I guess this line made more sense in the context of other news articles at the time.
He also had a poolside cabana that he used often; cabanas are usually covered and provide shade.
https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-prevention/
Clearly more research is needed.