WARNING: Raw Emotion Ahead
Howdy, FOTs. I lost my job today. That's the bad news. The good news is that I'm moving home to Northern Virgina and get to see my children again. Yeah for me. Oh, and my marriage appears to be over. Yuck.
It all began about a year and half ago. I was working at
BulkRegister.com (in Baltimore) when it was announced that we had been acquired by
enom.com, which is now the second largest domain registrar (just behind Bob Parson's Upsell Orgy, aka GoDaddy). I got along with the guys from Bellevue, Washington who were sent out East to de-commission the BulkRegister office (at 10 East Baltimore Street). They flew me out there to interview for a newly-created position doing XHTML / CSS. Web design, web development, etc. I took the job, thinking that finally things were looking up for my family. They stayed behind in Baltimore because we had yet to sell our rowhouse.
Soon after I moved out here, enom.com was acquired by
DemandMedia.com, a "new media company" founded by Richard Rosenblatt. He's the guy that made MySpace.com what it is today and sold it for a hefty profit. He used the money to buy good web properties ("good" being a website with good traffic that hasn't been "optimized" for ad revenue). That business model is working extremely well. DemandMedia is preparing itself for an IPO and was recently eval'd at 1 billion. Rosenblatt is very good at what he does and seems to be a nice guy (DM is based in LA, and I only met him in-person once).
Unfortunately, my focus had always been maintaining the beasts of enom: enom.com, bulkregister.com and enomcentral.com; I wasn't as heavily involved with the "media" side of things like
channelme.tv,
golflinks.com,
cracked.com, etc. And media is where the money is.
I'm trying to take a page from The Black Swan, and send out tight, info-packed missives in a very public way; I am trying to create my own luck and find gainful, rewarding work in the Northern Virginia area. I'm hoping that a FOT or two in the Nova area might know of a great opportunity that matches my "skill set" (
my resume, not yet updated) So here's some tidbits and name-drops to flesh me out. Indulge me as I brag on myself in an effort to make an impression.
My name is
Craig Dietz. Not Craig "Cisco" Dietz -- the photographer -- Craig "Andrew" Dietz. Got an email from
this guy the other day who thought I was Cisco. I thought of turning the mistake into a Paul Auster plot and answering as if I were the Other Craig, but he realized his goof before I could set it in motion.
"Rainer" is my first son's middle name.
I started out as a Kindergarten teacher, hated it, moved to NYC in 1990. Temped for a while -- you could actually smoke in the office, strange as it may seem now -- ran into a girl from college (Fredricksburg, VA) and started hanging out. Wrote really terrible folk songs with titles like "Guns in the Trees" and "There Are Some Things You Shouldn't Talk About (But This One Ain't One of Them)." Girl had a roommate who was Lou Reed's personal assistant.
The Reeds were about to go on tour, but needed additional help getting their Upper Westside apartment renovated; so Skeever (the assistant) got me a gig. This was right after Lou and John Cale finished recording Songs for Drella. I ended up working for him for about three years, during which time I got to do the original transcriptions of his song lyrics for the "Between Thought and Expression" book; to this day, I'm confident that the lyrics to
"The Murder Mystery" surely contain instances where it was my best guess and not Lou's actual word choice. Some standout memories:
* Eating french fries in a Munich McDonald's with Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker (during the VU Reunion Tour in 1993) and Sterling asking me if I "was impressed with the personages (i.e. he and the other VU members)" and then Moe chiding him and saying, "of course, he's impressed, Sterl."
* Sitting backstage at the Bob Dylan Columbia Records 30th Anniversary show. In our room: June Carter Cash, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson (and his young daughter playing with toys
in the center of the carpet). Swallowed hard and told Johnny Cash that I thought he music was fantastic and he actually said "Thank you very much" in what I think was a gentle Elvis
impersonation. Later, alone in the room with George Thorogood (with those black Risky Business glasses on) he asks me, "so, what do you do for Lou? Press, TV, guitar tech?" Just
then, Sylvia (Reed) sticks her head in the door and says "Craig, go get Lou two hamburgers from Big Nicks." George: "Oh, so that's what you do ..."
* Meeting Wim Wenders (an all-time cinema hero of mine) during the filming of "Far Away, So Close." Such a gentle man. It seemed like the more things went awry, the calmer he would get. Lou played himself in that movie, in a scene where he gives fallen-angel Otto Sander (very sweet man, too) a one-hundred dollar bill. Just after he gets the money, I walk in
front of the camera . Recently, Tom talked about un-hygenic food industry folks grabbing cups from the inside; on the set of Far Away, I was delighted to see Lou's mounting frustration when the gopher kept bringing him new coffees, each time carrying them with his fingers inside the cup, and Lou pretending to have changed his mind ("actually, can you make that a decaf?") hoping that in just a few more tries, the guy would realize he was holding the cup incorrectly. Never happened.
* Being in LA during the riots (Magic and Loss Tour) and talking about it -- as it unfolded -- with the strangely beautiful Little Jimmy Scott.
* Lou waiting for Bob Ludwig to arrive at his apartment to position his huge german speakers at the optimum angles, says to me "If you are waiting for somebody to show up, take a shit and the doorbell will ring."
* Hanging out with Sylvia as she hosted a party for Tyson Meade (singer for the Chainsaw Kittens) who she was trying to manage. Tyson wanted to do a special solo project along the lines of Low or Heroes, with an all-star backup group assembled from some of Sylvia's friends: Marc Ribot, Robert Quine, Tony Garnier (I *think* I remember him being there) and John Zorn (who Tyson apparently didn't know anything about). As Tyson walked out to the patio Zorn asked him what his project was about. Tyson told him what he wanted and mentioned that he wanted to include this guy named John Zorn. Zorn smiled sweetly and said, "I'm John Zorn."
* Having access to the lyrics to a new VU song that Lou and John wrote called "Cowboys and Indians" but not making a copy for myself. Never asked to sign a don't-talk-to-others-about-me thing by Lou. And other than these little bagatelles, I never have. Not even to Victor Bockris
At some point, I was either going to stay working for Lou or work for Sylvia and her new music management company, I chose to work for Sylvia, but completely freaked out and didn't tell Lou, which was very terrible of me. But really not THAT bad as we had hired another kid who was completely capable of doing what I did already. Remember, this is in the days when WordPerfect ruled the roost; no real internet to speak of. I later heard that he damned my name to anybody in the music industry who would listen. Can't blame him, but I've always wished it didn't play out the way it did. Sorry Lou.
In 1994, my wife got a job with the Discovery Channel, and we moved to Nova. I had to start all over. Landed a job at CRA a Department-of-Defense contractor in McLean VA that was lead by a terrible man who actually told people that he had helped pull people out of the rubble of the Pentagon on 911. He didn't. But he said he did. Unfucking believable.
At CRA I documented PowerScene, a 3D Visualization Tool used for Mission Planning and Rehearsal. I was one of the only people with an internet connection and was constantly subjected to "Incest1.mpg, Suck3.mpg" and other porn bread crumbs on my recent documents list. That Bill guy. Shudder.
So, I started documenting and got interested in HTML. Found Zeldman.com and got inspired. For the next few years, I was a technical writer but always went that extra mile to get my documentation to render correctly on IE and Netscape. The Browser Wars. Count yourself lucky if you were too young to remember them.
You would think that in the post 911 World, DOD Contractors would be sitting pretty. But that wasn't always the case, and definitely wasn't for us. If the USAF owes you 4 Million dollars for work that you have delivered, and doesn't pay it right away, you don't want to actually sue them for the money, because then you won't get any more contracts. It just got worse and worse. People were leaving in droves. I continued to plug away at markup and using CSS for positioning. Discovered Adobe Illustrator and started creating
vector illos . I aspired to be the Edward Tufte of End User Documentation.
When CRA ended, a creative director friend of mine, Pamela, helped me get my first paid spot illo commissions for Presstime Magazine. There is no money in spot illos, but if you do it long enough, you might get to do a cover, which pays pretty well. Soon, I got the gig at Alabanza (parent company of BulkRegister) and we moved the family to Baltimore. And that sort of brings you full-circle on me.
So, I'm all alone out here in my dank "basement apartment" in Everett WA. Seriously: sitting on a double-high air mattress (my fifth one .. they keep popping!) hunched over a small end table from Value Village, trying to get all the loose ends tied up so I can fly home and get the party started. Pack up all them CDs that I had intended to rip but never got around to doing. Call about donating my crap Prelude. Move on.
Thanks for indulging me. I'm just trying to put myself out there as a real person in the hopes that something might come of it in the job department. Also, just to connect with a digital community that, along with Tom and Jon, have helped me stay sane throughout all of this. You are good people.
