WCS 37: Palmer Luckey and the Trump tech strike to come
Too: Oregon top's border state +Jean-Michel Basquiat + that Jewish Woman running Mexico
None of you subscribers live in a California like that of Trump donors. Your version might look more like mine. Or even that of Jean-Michel Basquiat, during the short time he lived and painted (prodigiously) in Venice. More on that sojourn below.
Last night the American who most haunts European dreams kicked off his California fundraising efforts with a San Francisco dinner hosted by OG Silicon Valley money, Facebook, and PayPal. Half a mill per couple is near the top-end contribution cost. This afternoon he has a private campaign reception in Beverly Hills. Then, The Worst President in American History scuttles off to Newport Beach for an event hosted by entrepreneur Palmer Luckey.
Together with Elon Musk’s expected Trump alignment, the tech shift toward MAGA is looking powerful, if not representative. These people have an in on voter tendencies—remember Cambridge Analytica—so it’s okay to be a little unsettled.
Oculus Virtual Reality founder Luckey famously walked out of his Facebook gig with $100 million extra. The courts found that company executives had illegally nudged Luckey away from his Trump endorsement. Finally, a potent truth to bolster an actual shit-ton of GOP lies.
This Trump trip into enemy territory is not just about financing. It’s about martyrdom and symbolism, too. Hold steady.
Heck.
I want to move on to the week’s 10 zeitgeist-y matters, but also feel compelled to leave you with something positive about Fat Bastard. So:
Since the ex-prez got officially recognized as a felon, Trump’s bombast has lacked that characteristic edge of a man not one time disciplined since military school. To not notice takes work. And on Monday, Paula Collins—“ultra-MAGA” Elise Stefanik’s Congressional opponent—called into WNYC and observed that “surely he’s going to have a stroke at any moment.”
This is not a strategy or canvassing or even assassination. It is a fetish to hold in one’s back pocket.
Now, count backwards.
‘He hated white people and he loved them, in equal measure, and I wasn’t even mad at it.’
10 Which border state matters most to Oregon?
Here might be the least newsy item I’ve yet to include in West Coast Sojourn. I happened upon the border states conversations and I had a hard time letting it go.
A typically arrogant Californian, I automatically thought The Golden State Solution. Then a Redditor pointed out: “With Portland being so close to Washington, I'd be willing to bet that the Portland Metro area has more Washington residents working and shopping here than California, Nevada, and Idaho combined.”
Reddit
Touché.
You tell me. A lot of Idahoans do come across the western border to buy legal weed, but is it really that much?
Lil Hit
Fourteen years ago, DJ Jake One and Freeway created The Stimulus Package, a mixtape that I consider one of my the Pacific Northwest’s greatest hip hop offerings. Now they’re back, with Jadakiss, and they’re dope.
9 Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Venice address
Saturday is the last day that you can see "Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street” at the Larry Gagosian gallery in Beverly Hills. I went on Tuesday, at the invitation of friend and past Sojourn podcast guest Roger Guenveur Smith. It is with supreme embarrassment that I tell you I knew not one thing about Smith’s deep friendship with the New York artist. (For some reason, Smith is not in the 2010 Tamara Davis documentary The Radiant Child).
I’ve been around a few Basquiat paintings, but never so many strong ones at one time. Smith and Basquiat’s 22-year-old niece Sophia Heriveaux talked about the early eighties LA stint that produced the stunning work on display. The three pieces behind them lent a great depth to their anecdotes and recollections.
When Basquiat died in 1988, Smith was working in New York on Do the Right Thing, playing an inarticulate Brooklyn man who sells hand-colored pictures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and who thirsts for local revolutions. His LA running buddy’s
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