Left Coast Cowboys

[Dear Roger Ebert Fans: If you are coming here in response to his kind recommendation, he was referring to this earlier post.]

Chicago, Chicago that toddlin’ town.
Chicago, Chicago I will show you around.

I’m not quite sure what toddlin’ is, but I’m sure I did a lot of it this past weekend. Which is great, because Chicago is one city I’ve always passed by for some reason. Except for a wedding I was in and the time I was snowed in at O’Hare for 7 hours waiting for a connecting flight. I loved the Blogher Conference, but one of the best things I did was get out of it and get into Chicago’s streets with real Chicagoans (Chicagoites?) One of the highlights was walking and clicking around the South Loop with a photography group buddy who shall be known by his nom de flickr: Kingdufus. He and I both belong to the Flickr group Project 365, where members commit to taking and posting a picture a day for a year. If many of us know the West through John Ford’s movies, well, I can be said to know Chicago through Kingdufus’s pictures.

Interesting note: when I tried to take a big panorama of tall buildings, it came out as if the buildings on the edges of the pictures were falling down. They aren't.

So here are some of the highlights with the complete set here (where you might even see a picture of the elusive Kingdufus.) Unfortunately, coming from low-profile San Francisco and Sonoma (where we might have a two story feed barn somewhere), most of my pictures tended to be looking up at all the tall, tall buildings. Luckily The King was there to point out all the details of doors, grates and windows that I would otherwise have missed. I also got his Chicago Curmudgeon’s take on everything from Mayor Daley to cafes taking over sidewalks to Donald Trump.

My curmudgeonly friend told me not to pronounce the T in the 'Rump Building 'cause Donald Trump is an Ass.

My conclusion? Well after travelling all over the world, I’m now going to have to firmly declare that Chicago is a WORLD CLASS CITY (with all the caps). Besides the sights, there is a wonderful energy here. But not the sometimes scary, edgy energy of New York. Rather a friendly Midwestern energy (even if nobody in Chicago knows their way around, a theory I tested when I got lost on Thursday night.) In the words of our Governator: I’ll be baaaaack.

Kingdufus kept trying to convince me that this Picasso sculpture was actually done by Pablo's underachieving little brother, Ernie.

This is The Bean in Millennium Park. Which is very cool in a Magritte surreal kind of way.

The patented Kingdufus Architectural Tour also takes you UNDER Chicago. Some of it is a little scarier than this.

This is the Fisher Building. Commissioned, I think, by some guy named Fisher...

Who loved his name so much, he had the whole building covered with carved carp, salamander and other "fishy" motifs.

This is George Washington shaking hands with someone I've never heard of and someone called Hyam Soloman. So I think this is one of Washington's Middle East peace forums. Kingdufus says the buildings in the back are the "Corncob School of Architecture."

The Kingdufus Tour also included a run through the Art Institute where we saw a great exhibit on Wine Through the Ages.

I haven't even mentioned the inside parts of the tour that showed me grand staircases, a city model and this Tiffany dome.

At this point, I could do the expected thing and paste in a Frank Sinatra video from YouTube. But I’m going to treat you to Valdemar, the Russian Frank Sinatra:

Made it back from Chicago and BlogHer and can barely remember my own name, let alone pull together a blog post. So here are some bits and pieces of wisdom or foolishness. You decide which is which.

Interesting Fact: Flickr can be used as a child behavior modification tool

Waiting for my flight in an overcrowded, hot and muggy O’Hare I sat behind a woman with three overtired, overwrought, whining kids. The mother was reaching the medical condition that I believe psychiatric professionals term “Losing One’s Shit.” At the point where she stepped away from the kids and said, “You have to not touch me and not talk to me for the next two minutes”, I knew I had to spring into action. Since my laptop was open and I had Flickr in a window, I quickly typed in the tag “terrier” into the “search my photostream” option. Up came all 2000 or so of the pictures I’ve taken of my dogs Lucy and Oscar. “Hey kids, want to see pictures of puppies?” Kids rapt. Crisis averted. Another mom saved. Hint: this works best with terriers.

Interesting BlogHer Fact #1

Georgia Getz of the great site, I Am Bossy, is thin as a whippet. But just as funny in person as she is electronically.

Interesting BlogHer Fact #2

Keynote Speaker Donna Byrd, publisher of The Root, showed grace, calm and what I’m calling “The Sotomayor Poker Face” when asked about last week’s events with her fellow Root editor, Professor Henry Gates. Can someone send Sonia and Donna to Vegas, ’cause those gals could clean up in high stakes poker.

Random Thought

Chicago is an amazing city, especially if you walk it. And don’t keep staring up at the tall buildings like I did. It makes you look like a rube from farm country. Plus you miss all the interesting architectural and decorative details on the door arches, gates and gratings.

Wishful Thinking

Can one recharge one’s brain with an iPhone charger?

Internet Expectations Exploded

Checked my visitor stats to find they are through the roof. Hundreds and hundreds more visitors than usual. Thought it was my fabulous wrap up of the BlogHer Conference. Nope, someone Stumbled my tribute last month to Farrah Fawcett. That’s okay, she deserves another look.

The BlogHer ‘09 Conference has been so jam-packed I’ve barely been able to Twitter, let alone blog. But before we get started, let me first reassure you that it hasn’t been because I was one of the tiara and boa wearing girls passing out drunk in the lobby after way too many cocktails.

I met up with a fellow Mount Holyoke College alum last night who is a former Chicago Tribune editor. We were at a downtown Italian sidewalk cafe having just maybe one glass of Chianti too many and solving All World Problems. Although we must have bumped into each other in college, we really became acquainted on Facebook recently. It was astonishing to discover that Cassandra is the smartest person in the world. Why? Because she and I both have the same answers to All World Problems. Over Lake Huron whitefish and fava beans, we tackled racism in America, the education crisis, the media shakeout between print and web-based sources, journalistic ethics, Obama’s cabinet picks, the financial crisis and so much more. We shut that cafe down and by 12:30 were back at the Hotel still needing to finish formulating the solution for health care. So we stopped for a nightcap at the hotel bar. That’s when the tiara and boa wearing BlogHer party girls came screaming in. It’s a shame. The Riot Grrrrrrls were so loud and distracting, we never did put the final touches on the Healthcare Solution. Obama will be so disappointed. Blame it on BlogHer.

This is as close to Tina Brown as I could get.

I was hiding behind the giant Ragu vegetable sculpture at the time.

Not to say that I’m an old grump who begrudges Gen Y the chance to turn BlogHer into one big Cosmo party. The way BlogHer is evolving, it seems you can have the kind of conference you want. They really upped the tech quotient with lots of intimate, hands-on sessions on special coding topics such as SEO, hacks, CMS, etc. Although there seem to be ever more Mommy Bloggers, you can avoid those sessions if you aren’t interested. In fact, the BlogHer organizers did a great job of really tracking things out, so you could mostly stick to your interests. They further tracked things by offering Birds of a Feather lunches so Travel Bloggers had a table, LGBT Bloggers had their table, Political Bloggers had their table.

At the surprisingly good meals, you could take the Cannoli. (I left it.)

I took three churros. Wanna make something of it?

The problem is: I didn’t fit at any table. Where was the table for the bloggers who cover things like composting, winemaking, and terriers with occasional forays into political rants, pictures of coyote poo and musings on crap British TV programs. Worse yet (at least as far as me getting a seat at the Kewl Table), blogging seems to have grown up. Everyone was networking like mad, looking to monetize, aggregate and leverage. When the inevitable question was asked: “What do you blog about?” their eyes were glazing over before I could even get past “Well, it’s like Green Acres”. Clearly I was not A CONTACT. You could see the mental “NEXT”. Amazing that just last year, it seemed there were only two kinds of blogs, the Mommy Blogger or the wild and crazy category-defying conglomerate of opinion and rants (and the more disparate the better). Now everyone is focusing down, building a platform, seeking to own a niche market. I was a lot more popular last year.

Where was the BlogHer track for bloggers who write about wine-making and terrier-wrangling? And coyote poo and eccentric British husbands and friends. And political rants and vampires and roadtrips.

Now I realize I should have worked on the Elevator Pitch instead of just laughing about it. This was really punched home when I found myself forced to participate in a role-playing exercise  in my first session. Before I could say, “I came to sit quietly in the back of the room”, I was paired off with twelve other bloggers to “own my expertise”. And I had to go first. I hate going first. It always makes you look like the dumb one.

Moderator: Quick finish this sentence: I’m an expert in [blank] because I have [blank] credentials and [add validating facts].

Me: I am an expert in hilarious clueless city to country transitions because three years ago I started a biodynamic winery and farm and I’ve made and learned from every mistake that can be made along the way. As a consequence, I now have a huge Albanian readership and I’m the number one result when you Google “horse cowboy sex”.

***Crickets****

Stony faces.

Clearly, I was wasting valuable space and time for people who were there to MONETIZE, AGGREGATE AND LEVERAGE.

Wait? Was I just complaining about the Party Hardy Crowd and now I’m griping about the bloggers who were too focused? There’s just no pleasing some people. I decided to just drop back, lose the agenda and wander around seeing what looked interesting. That seemed to work, and once again, I have to say that the information you get out of BlogHer is well worth the price of admission.

Is there another blogger out there who posts as many pictures of coyote poo? Talk about "owning your niche".

But enough about my BlogHer experience. You really came here to see if I realized my BlogHer goal of becoming BFFs with Tina Brown and The Pioneer Woman. Tina Brown, not so much. I saw her in the lobby having a very animated conversation but got all shy and bashful. The best I could do was hide behind the giant Ragu Vegetable Sculpture and take a quick point and shoot picture. But her keynote discussion with Ilene Chaiken of The L Word and Donna Byrd of The Root was fascinating, provacative and crisply British. (When asked how she resists oversaturating The Daily Beast with celebrity pictures and news, even though such things raise stats, she replied: “It’s often the boys on the staff who want more celeb pictures. We girls just have to get very cross with them and get politics back on priority.”) Anyone older than me who feels comfortable calling herself a “girl” and can talk about an editorial decision as “being cross”, well, Tina, all is forgiven.

Now to The Pioneer Woman. Remember that redhead I saw get off the elevator the first day. It must have been her because she seems to be staying on my floor. Imagine my surprise, as I rushed to the elevator from my room after a midmorning break, and The Pioneer Woman comes up behind me to get on as well.

So of course I said: ”Are you The Pioneer Woman?”

She said, “I’m supposed to be.”

It was clear she hadn’t gotten the memo or had just skipped that blog post where I explained that we are just like Twins except I didn’t marry a cowboy and run over one of my dogs like she did.

I said: “I have a blog like yours. Sort of a Green Acres thing about clueless city people trying to become farmer/ranchers. Except our livestock are terriers. And it’s not really a ranch. It’s a vineyard.”

Now I have to note that Pioneer Woman isn’t the folksy cowboy boot wearing Western gal you might think. She’s soft-spoken and polite and sort of surprisingly Supermodel willowy. And she was very good at hiding what must have been alarm at being stuck in an elevator car with someone who might be a crazed stalker. One with terriers.

So she very sweetly said: “Oh, what’s your blog?”

That’s when I shamelessly pressed one of my cards into her hand.

And I can talk about this encounter because I’m sure she’s never going to show up here. In fact, at this point, she’s probably trying to find out how to block my IP address from all subsections of her site. And alerting the police in her neck of Oklahoma to be on the alert if a woman who looks like she might be a San Franciscan shows up with terriers.

But it could have all been so different. If I’d only worked on that Elevator Pitch like the BlogHer people told me I should. And if I’d brought up my impressive Albanian readership. And the top Google Search thing.

You know, I bet if I’d told her Donny Osmond liked this post so much he put it on the home page of his fansite, she would have been really impressed.

Okay, we in San Francisco think we are one of the leading metro centers in America. After all, by most counts, we are the fourth largest metropolitan area in the country. I’m still willing to fight anyone who says we don’t have one of the best art/music/opera/culture epicenters in the U.S. But today was a crash course in learning that a “Metropolitan Area” is not the same thing as a Big City. San Francisco is a small (although lovely) town surrounded by a “Metropolitan Area”. Chicago is a Big City. Biiiiig Biiig City. Until very recently, when a former mayor who shall not be named got in bed with big contractors, San Francisco had a building height limit of something around 8 stories. Now we have a few high rises, but they are so obvious, everyone tells direction by pointing to a tower and saying, “Walk toward that tower.”

Silly me, I thought I could navigate that way in Chicago. After all, I’m staying at the Chicago Sheraton and Towers. So I could walk all around the town and find my way back just by scanning the horizon for the tower. (Which, if it were like San Francisco, would have the name helpfully emblazoned on the top.) Guess what? All the buildings are towers. You can’t even see my tower between all the other towers. I know this because I walked for miles and miles down admittedly beautiful Chicago avenues. I walked down Madison. I went through something called the Jewelry District. I walked through what I’m convinced was the setting for the movie Saint Elmo’s Fire (Demi Moore and Rob Lowe were long gone). I landed in a really interesting place called Millennium Park. At which point I discovered that most Chicagoans are very, very friendly and anxious to give you directions. Except they don’t have a clue where anything is. Luckily I met a security guard with an iPhone who found out I had somehow strayed 5 miles from my hotel. (Which was amazing as the restaurant I went to was only a mile from the hotel.) At that point, hailing a cab was the better part of valour. But I certainly got my money’s worth out of Chicago tonight. Even as I confronted the fact that I thought I was a San Francisco hipster and I’m just a kid from the sticks.

The iPhone can do a lot. But it can't capture Chicago lightning storms from the back of the airport shuttle.

Okay, let me backtrack. So far — just hours into this junket — I already felt as if I were having a real Chicago experience. I landed in O’Hare, just in time for the scariest thunder/lightning/hail storm the Midwest could produce. I can’t decide what was more disconcerting. The ferocity of the storm or the fact that this was precipitation in summer. Nope, don’t have that in Sonoma. My camera was in the airport shuttle’s trunk, so I was reduced to trying to snap shots of lightning with my iPhone. And I seem to have brought the wrong connectors. So what’s taken into the iPhone, stays in the iPhone for this trip.

Met with an old college friend who is now so important and so mysterious, she will henceforth be referred to as Greta Garbo.

So let’s step way back. One of the best things about this Blogher Conference is that it’s not going to be all about Blogging. First thing scheduled was meeting with a good friend from college (who was Maid of Honor at my wedding). We’d dropped out of each other’s lives for awhile so it was good to be back in touch. Especially since she is a good friend to have. I’m keeping her identity under wraps because, well I’m not exactly sure what she does, but I’m pretty sure that if she goes on vacation or sneezes or gets a cold and has to take NyQuil, Corporate America comes to a shocking standstill. So for the sake of this blog (and our floundering economy), let’s just call her Greta Garbo. Well, Greta had some hair-raising tales to tell of her recent years. Again, no details, but I’m writing the “ripped from  today’s headlines” Law & Order script the story deserves. But on a lighter note, she’d easily fit into the clothes we used to share in college. And those clothes would be all hers. (Because I can’t fit in them anymore.) She also had the wisdom to take me to a proper steakhouse with aged beef. It was the kind of place Frank Sinatra would have patronized. I should have had the Martini. But I figured after little sleep, the dehydration of flight, etc. that might be a bad move. Turns out it was wise to forgo the Martini given that I would be wandering the streets of this toddlin’ town for hours afterwards.

It’s almost a shame to plunge into all that blogging stuff tomorrow after this introduction. I think I’d rather be walking the streets of Chicago. But I did have an exciting celebrity moment. As I ran into the elevator with five minutes to shower, change and get a cab to the restaurant, a long-haired redhead got out. I’m convinced it was The Pioneer Woman. If I’d had even a few more minutes, I would have reminded her that we are Twin Ranching Sisters With Absolutely Nothing In Common. And we are supposed to discover we are BFFs this weekend.

Well, there’s always time at the session she’s moderating.

Just a few more interesting things about Chicago:

1. All the cabbies seem to be from West Africa.

2. They all think Obama is in town.

3. One told me he was staying at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers.

4. I’m pretty sure he was NOT invited to BlogHer ‘09. (Maybe Michelle was.)

Two more pictures of Left Coast Cowboys’ BlogHer Experience: The Lost Hours:

Millennium Park was the coolest thing I've seen since the Olympic Village in Beijing.

And then there were the parts of the City that looked like something out of 19th Century Paris.

It suddenly dawned on me that I’m leaving for Chicago and Blogher ‘09 in a few days. It just about slipped my mind. Or maybe I’ve been blocking it out. Anyone who read my old blog will remember this post, Confessions of a Blogher Drop-out, where I talked about my mixed feelings about the conference. On the one hand, I found too much of the conference to be a giggly sorority party where the uncool kids tried to bump shoulders with the A-Listers in hopes that some of the magic would rub off. On the other hand, I got so much technical, programming and practical blogging information just from the sessions I attended on the first day, the cost of the conference was well worth it. But I did manage to piss off some A-Listers whose session I criticized as being not much more than a giggle-fest and virtually content-free. So I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be sitting at the Kewl Table.

Will Pioneer Woman be my new BFF? We're EXACTLY the same. Except she has actual non-terrier animals on her ranch. And she's married to a cowboy, I'm married to an Englishman. She's on the prairie. I'm in Wine Country. But otherwise, TWINS.

What I’m going to be again is a fish out of water. Or a Blogger Who Defies the Categories. I’m not a Mommy Blogger, I’m not a Food Blogger, and I’m not really a Travel Blogger or a Photography Blogger, although I do feature travel and photography from time to time. I’m not a Political Blogger or a Humor Blogger, yet I do subject my readers to my political rantings and my attempts at humor on a semi-regular basis. Most of the sessions seem to be centered on those categories. With a big, big emphasis on Mommy Blogging. In fact, the parties and social events, at least last year, seemed to become some sort of “Mommy Bloggers Gone Wild” thing. These ladies do need to get more vacations if the somewhat desperate “girls out alone hi-jinks” are any indication. Not that I want to be a wet blanket or anything. But I want to meet and talk to some of the bloggers I read. Not necessarily get hammered and throw up in the bathroom with them. But maybe that stuff never really happened and the various blogger escapades I read about were just “blogging license.” I’ll be the first to admit that we bloggers do exaggerate for effect.

So what sessions will I be going to? After all, there are dozens. The choice, for me, is easy. Eliminate the Mommy Blogging Sessions and those five remaining are mine. Especially the session called:  LifeBlogging Outside the Lines: When you’re not a Geek, a Political Wonk or a MommyBlogger. Exactly.

This is how Tina Brown will look when she discovers I'm at Blogher, too. The BFF she always knew she'd someday meet.

Oh, and the Tech Sessions which they are calling Geek Labs. I’m definitely hitting all the tech sessions. If you remember my hokey old Blogspot site and when it transitioned to this sleek Wordpress wonder, you should be aware that I learned all about how to do it at Blogher.  I think I even have an “in” as it turns out one of the techies was on jury duty the same week I was and peeked over my shoulder as I wrote this post. In fact, at the last Blogher, I found that the techies really truly believed that no question was too dumb. And I asked more than my share of dumb questions. They were answered patiently, understandably and with enthusiasm. Yay, Geeks!

And yes, I’m going to have my Celebrity Moment. I’m attending The Pioneer Woman’s session: Enough About You…Who’s Reading You? ‘Cause if anyone knows about getting readers, it’s The Pioneer Woman. If you are one of the two people alive who doesn’t know her, her blog chronicles her transition from City Girl to Cowboy’s Wife. Now it’s the biggest catch-all with Cooking, Homeschooling, Photography, Home and Garden and other sections as well. She’s not really what I’d call a cook (most things taste good with a couple of sticks of butter and some bacon on it, which seems to be the core of her recipes.) She’s not really a typical rancher’s wife as her husband is a multi-millionaire. But boy, can she sell the dream. She’s the Martha Stewart of the Prairie. Her fans don’t just want to cook her recipes or pick up her photography tips, they want to be her. As a consequence, she’s the only blogger who’s a serious threat to Dooce. And all without a single dirty word or discussion of gross bodily functions. Gotta admire that and you gotta hear what she has to say.

Don’t even get me started on Tina Brown, revitalizer of Vanity Fair and founder of The Daily Beast. She’s the key note speaker and I’d travel all the way to Chicago just to see her. The only better choice for Key Note? Rachel Maddow!

So anyway, if anyone else is going to Blogher, look for me. I’ll be the one skulking around in the non-Mommy Blogging sessions, asking dumb questions in the Geek Labs and not vomiting in the Sheraton bathrooms.

Then again, maybe I could give Pioneer Woman some dog maintenance tips. After all, I never backed the car over one of my canines as she did her Basset Hound, Charlie. Just not sure I could build a blog brand out of that dubious skill. Especially since that talent may be more about the fact that I have faster dogs.