I mean, we spill an awful lot of electrons around here yammering on about the sheer fuck-witted stupidity of our white supremacist BIDdie friends, but somehow the unmitigated bag-of-kidney-stones level dumbness on display at these people’s meetings still has the power to astonish.1 Evidence for this claim? Witness, if you will, this recent meeting of the Fashion District BID‘s freaking marketing committee, kindly recorded for your viewing pleasure2 by one of our long-time correspondents, the mysterious Mr. Mike.
Most of the meeting consisted, as usual, of creak-voiced FDBID Marketrix Extraordinaire Ariana Gomez3 yammering on about web freaking analytics, affinity freaking groups, in-freaking-fluencers, social freaking media freaking blah-de-freaking-blah-blah-blah, and the usual sort of jive one might expect to be emitted by a bunch of BIDdies all hopped up on managerial jargon and an unshakably delusional sense of the depth, value, and intrinsic rightness of their own objectively bizarro world-view. There were at least a couple of non-coma-inducing episodes as well, though!
First, Fashion District Board of Directors member, part-time executive directrix in her own right, and by far the least brilliant bulb in the metaphorical Fashion District chandelier, the inimitable Ms. Laurie Sale, started a flap about some map app crap and was dealt a slap by the generation gap. Watch and listen here, and turn the page for some mockery and the usual transcription.
Second, Rena Leddy,4 who in the past has somehow managed to pass fairly successfully as a sane person, gave up on that whole pointless charade and took a great deal of time out of everyone’s lives to explain how that periodic BID-sponsored black mass known as the Urban Dinner Party celebrates a lack of public space by reserving a public street for a private party, forbidding the public from even entering it without a pricey ticket, and how this somehow turns the closed-off street into public space.5 Watch and listen here, and, as above, turn the page for some mockery and the usual transcription.
So first of all, the BIDdies were going on and on and on and on about maps of their district. BIDdies, of course, love them some maps. And signs. And arrows painted on things. And so on. So much so that they’ve begun to develop yet another tin-eared sub-dialect to talk about it.6 And as they blabbered on, Laurie Sale woke up all of a sudden! And not quite knowing where she was or why she was there? She immediately jumped into the conversation: Have we ever investigated developing an app … map? A map app?7
And then both Rena Leddy and Ariana Gomez yammered on for a while, and you can read the details below, but essentially the totality of their comments added up to a great big resounding “Laurie Sale, you don’t know the first damn thing about what you’re saying, so why don’t you shut it!?”
And Laurie Sale tried valiantly to save her pride, saying: “But I’m wondering with all the tech companies that are coming down here maybe we could partner with somebody and exchange …” Just saying the word “partner” doesn’t mean anyone’s going to want to do it, Laurie Sale. And what are you going to “exchange?”
Here’s a clue for you, friend, so now you have one. The app economy works like this: You exchange a lot of money for an app. And then you exchange a lot more money for updates to the app. There’s really nothing that app consumers have to exchange with app creators for their apps other than actual money. Meanwhile, no one wants to use your damned app because not only is this not 2007, it hasn’t been 2007 for over a damned decade.
Laurie Sale, who must be used to this kind of thing since like fourth grade, evidently has a fallback tactic for when she realizes that she’s being really, really wrong and all the normies are trying not to snort milk out their noses. Thus spake Laurie Sale: No, I agree! OK, thanks!! That, I believe, is Lauriesalese for “Please stop yelling at me and don’t humiliate me any more pretty please?”
Finally, in the matter of the damned Urban Dinner Party, I tried and tried, but I found I could not do better than Rena Leddy’s own words as she explains for some damn reason that the BID needed to close the street to the public in order to make it be public space. She didn’t get around to destroying the village in order to save it, but that’s never far from these BIDdies’ minds. Take a look, and I’ll see you soon with more FDBID goodies!8
Transcription of Rena Leddy going full Orwell:
We wanted to have a conversation with the restaurant because we felt like if we’re gonna keep doing this event the purpose … we need to figure out what the purpose is. The purpose when we first started it was to show we’re creating a public space on a street. And to show that you could have more public spaces in the district. As you guys know, in the Fashion District there really weren’t a lot of public spaces where people could congregate. And so that was the original product of it. That still holds true, but we’re running out of places to do that without negatively impacting business, right? So closing down a street on a Thursday night, like there’s just not a lot of places we would do that. And so that made us sort of morph into this whole conversation about do we have to do it with a different restaurant, can it be a number of restaurants, so we wanted to kinda get some feedback from the restaurant community to see if this is something they were interested in before we even pursued sort of what’s next.
Transcription of the crap map app flap:
LS: Have we ever investigated developing an app … map? A map app?
AG: Yes. There was an app a few years ago, and it was to help with parking. [unintelligible] … a parking spot to our directory so you could theoretically see what businesses were around you. But it had a lot of bugs. And we didn’t have the budget to keep updating it so I pulled it because it wasn’t working and we were getting really negative reviews.
LS: But I’m wondering with all the tech companies that are coming down here maybe we could partner with somebody and exchange …
RL: So we were talking about doing an all-encompassing Downtown app, and we met with some sorta experts on [unintelligible] … on apps. And it’s really, apparently it’s very difficult to get somebody to actually download an app on their phone, and so you spend like tens of thousands of dollars on something that people aren’t … I mean, think about yourself. Are you really like, oh I can’t wait to download this app and use it? We’re not, like, we just are not. So I’m not sure it’s worth investigating. I actually think we’re better off being low tech when it comes to maps. And on the website, and we get hundreds of calls a year, on just that, directions and maps, those kinda things, you can download this map in a PDF and print it, so if you don’t run across like an actual map. So I don’t think it’s worth investigating, Laurie. It’s so expensive and from everybody we’re talking to it’s not …
LS: No, I agree! OK, thanks!!
RL: And the other thing, is our website is, I believe, mobile friendly, so you could actually pull it up on here.
AG: One of the things I wanna focus on for the website redesign is figuring out how to optimize for mobile. When I think of apps what comes to my mind for this district is we don’t have the budget to maintain, so to me there’s, it all starts [unintelligible] but I really want to work with whoever we end up hiring to redo the website to make sure that the mobile experience is top notch. That’s where most of the people coming to our site are currently coming to our mobile site. And when we redid the website last, we did make sure that it was mobile friendly and we put a lot of work into it, but that was a few years ago. The technology that was like top notch then is obsolete now. So I think there’ll be a lot of room for improvement there just by redoing the site.
Image of Laurie Sale is ©2018 MichaelKohlhaas.org and was ploofed up outta this lil guy.
- You may be wondering, because I occasionally get questions about this, what their white supremacism has to to with their unmitigated stupidity? Well, clearly, white supremacy is in the business of putting white people in charge rather than qualified people. True, some white people are not as dumb as a bag of kidney stones, but if competence is less a criterion for filling a position than whiteness, this is going to be fairly irrelevant. Fill your places in society by skin color and you’re going to get a lot more stupid people in positions. This is yet another example of that phenomenon.
- Or what passes for it in BIDlandia, anyway.
- Ariana Gomez is also the stealth social media operative of the BID. She’s like a Russian troll except she’s not Russian and she’s subverting democracy for the sake of the Fashion District BID instead of for the sake of providing lubrication for the unholy union of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Which is morally better, I guess, unless you happen to live in Los Angeles rather than America. Anyway, how much does anyone want to bet that Ariana Gomez is the putative brains behind the now-blocked anonymous Wikipedia account known as FDBID? I’m not sure how to prove this theory using the CPRA, but if anything occurs to me I’ll let you know. It’s clear, though, that one of your higher quality sub rosa Wiki-operatives might know how not to get banned after one month and less than 50 edits. I suppose that’s why she’s not playing in the big leagues, like the Downtown Center BID.
- I don’t know why I’m going on about Laurie Sale being anything to do with kidneys, when the damn BID is run by a lady named RenaL … Wouldn’t it be too funny if she were named after her father Eddy?
- Probably it makes sense after that third bottle of Chardonnay. BRB, gotta run to Trader Joe’s!
- Wayfinding, anyone? GMAFB!
- Not kidding. That’s actually what she said.
- I see I didn’t manage to get around to talking about how much smarter Ariana Gomez is than Kylie Jenner. It’s gotta be in the next post, friends, but you won’t be disappointed, no, not even a teensy bit!
