Rise If You Must

Two nice days in a row has me almost giddy for summer. 

Here’s an ode to summer in the city that I wrote in 2004. You’ll be able to tell that the references to certain places (A60, Bulgarian Bar) are outdated. That’s the way it was baby. But almost all of this is still true.

41 Hot Times From A Summer In The City

Opera in the park, with bits of cheese and chilled Sancerre in plastic cups.

Lingering lunches in shaded sidewalk bistros.

Rooftop parties overserving beer out of garbage cans filled with ice and sand.

Sunrise whiskeys with bartenders in the Rockaways.

Girls in short skirts with beads of sweat on the small of their backs.

Falling asleep on the lawn alongside the Hudson River.

Aperitifs at A60.

Midday movies to escape the humidity.

Seared tuna salad and buffalo mozzarella and three pinot grigio lunches.

The song of the summer.

Pretending the subway doesn’t exist.

Dancing at the Bulgarian bar until your clothes stick to your everything.

Bloomsday breakfast Guinness.

Poolside rooftop mojitos.

Kids playing whiffle ball in the park.

Rounds of lights and darks at McSorely’s.

Backyard barbeques.

Churchyard sangrias.

Pints of lager outside the Ear.

Steamy shagging.

Belmont Stakes.

Publishing and advertising girls drinking at noon on Fridays.

Emerging from a perspiration and beer soaked dive bar into the crisp pre-dawn air.

Summerstage beertent.

Making out in taxis, aroused from the sudden application of air-conditioning.

Shakespeare in the Park.

Champagne breaknight breakfasts in Inwood Park.

Salted Tecantes in a Chinatown Mexican restaurant.

Smoking cigarettes in the Goodworld alley garden.

Flirting with the daughters of firemen in Breezy point.

Long days spent in dark bars.

Chilled gazpacho.

Watermelons soaked with vodka.

Interns with improbably fashionable clothes and the spending habits of people who are spending other people’s money.

Old flames.

New infernos.

Tar beach sunbathing.

Avoiding parades with all day bruches that turn into all night bacchanals.

Chasing the ghost of Dylan Thomas at the Whitehorse tavern.

Fireworks from an Avenue B rooftop.

Wilting while watching the Yankees.

Midnight oysters at Milk & Honey.

Great and insightful article from Heidi Moore on whether we’re in a social media bubble. (Answer: of course we are, dummy.)

The current tech bubble has a different kind of entrepreneur: the spiffed-up careerist Alex P. Keaton. He’s an individualist, not a cult leader. He dresses like a hipster, but he’s an Ayn Randian capitalist through-and-through. He doesn’t want to do all the work himself. Instead, he creates a technology that gets members (or “friends”) to provide all the content and thus the profits.

But – here’s another big difference from the last tech bubble — today’s social media entrepreneur is thinking of and usually getting some profits. And, notably – as every venture capitalist will tell you – the big social media companies are actually earning money. They’re creating Web sites to connect thousands, and in several cases, millions of people.

The problem is that venture capitalists can’t throw any more money at Facebook or Twitter, so they’re piling it on many start-ups that are in the same sector, but don’t have the same record of accomplishment. Facebook is unique.

One more consideration. Mutual fund mainstays like Fidelity and T. Rowe Price are trying to buy pre-I.P.O. shares of Facebook and Twitter, among other companies. Facebook and Twitter aren’t yet public, which means they don’t disclose their financial statements and haven’t agreed to the same restrictions that the Securities and Exchange Commission puts on public companies. When you have mutual funds serving regular investors putting that money into companies that aren’t transparent, it surely starts to look like a bubblicious frenzy.

As weird and sometimes awful as the dot-com bubble was, it actually did change the world. The biggest tech company around now was born during its height in 1998: Google, whose early wealth was based on eyeballs.