24 ms·

The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

273 points by zeveb 2y ago

psyclobe 2y ago
These are the kinda articles I like to just read the last paragraph. So much work to paint some annoying ass story; sorry, I skipped to the end haha.
- 16mb 2y ago
  I thought the journey was well-written, captivating and worth the read.
  - psyclobe 2y ago
    Huh, maybe I should give it a go...
- kittikitti 2y ago
  I'm still trying to find the reason this was posted and boosted, instead of some very important AI news coming out recently.
  - yownie 2y ago
    probably because we're all sick of AI news
deleted 2y ago
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pvg 2y ago
https://archive.is/eRc3M https://archive.is/eRc3M
blakesterz 2y ago
I don't know why I found this so interesting to read. After the first few paragraphs I wondered why this was in The New Yorker, afterall, this is about a place in CA. The answer did appear, eventually... “My story begins on the Lower East Side of New York,” he said...
- tmiku 2y ago
  The NY specificity implied by the publication name is archaic. Apart from the event listings or performance/exhibit reviews, The New Yorker's long form coverage has been nationally (sometimes globally) focused for decades, albeit through the lens of what America's coastal elites find interesting.
  - dhosek 2y ago
    There’s a great scene in the movie World’s Greatest Dad where Robin Williams plays a frustrated writer. Another teacher at the school where he teaches gets a story in The New Yorker¹ and Robin Williams’s character tells him something along the lines of “how nice, I hope your next one gets published somewhere that isn’t regional.”² ⸻ 1. This is generally considered the pinnacle of literary short fiction publishing. 2. He was, of course, being ironic (and bitterly jealous). As an aside, the movie is a brilliant dark comedy, written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait who’s come a long way from his Police Academy days.
    - ubermonkey 2y ago
      Yeah, it's kind of a lost idea now, but through the 80s and 90s the absolute best places to get a story published were, in no particular order: * The New Yorker * Harper's * The Atlantic * and, believe it or not, Playboy In re: the latter, see https://ew.com/books/playboy-hugh-hefner-famous-authors/ https://ew.com/books/playboy-hugh-hefner-famous-authors/
      - dhosek 2y ago
        Hugh Hefner was a surprising patron of the arts. Playboy made so much money that he poured it into funding some amazing writing (while the standard joke was “I read Playboy for the articles,” the articles were generally quite amazing) not to mention funding some significant work in printing and typographic technology (one example: the magazine used Palatino for its text and when the type on the gravure pages didn’t match the type on the offset pages, they had a custom version of Palatino made to correct the discrepancy). Those three are still the top tier, at least when it comes to money for short fiction, although it’s depressing to read stuff from the 30s which has dollar amounts attached to publications and realize that even in nominal dollars, those would be better paychecks than most writers receive today.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
(1993). The hotel reopened in 1996 but Irving never returned. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...
- owenversteeg 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/LmhBD https://archive.ph/LmhBD What a lovely article. A lot to learn from that old man. I quoted a few things, for the HN crowd (myself included) that often reads comments and seldom reads articles: >He’s also a youthful, gentle man glowing sans peur et sans reproche while bringing a moment of grace, manners and style to largely impolite, undignified and profane times. That’s why people, even the known and confident, seek admission to his court, to be touched by politesse: Because he’s an escape, a salve that somehow, just for a moment, delivers us from what’s out there, which is harsh and threatening. Or as friend and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik says: He is our perception of the ideal grandfather. Or how grandfather would be if he left grandmother home. “People . . . ask to meet Irving just so they can say they had at last met a man who has it all figured out,” says Gopnik, now living in Paris. He sees Link as a true California type as much as any snazzy actor or wealthy courtesan. “He puts me in mind of some great performance piece. Irving is his own creation.” ... >Yet Link’s daily ritual hasn’t gone away. He walks two miles from home each morning to the hotel, for granola, bananas and berries over The Times and the trades. One cup of decaf. Then onto Wilshire and Camden and Little Joe’s barbershop, where little Giuseppe Bausoue (“I make house calls to Frank Sinatra”) coiffures, blow-dries and sprays Link’s pearl-white hair into a stiff sculpture. Max, chauffeuring the hotel’s black Rolls-Royce, has Link back at the Peninsula around 9:30 a.m. Upstairs to the spa, into a terry robe and slippers, and out to a cabana for the first of dozens of incoming and outgoing phone calls. Maybe a turkey sandwich lunch alongside the pool where tans are oiled umber, cellular phones tinkle incessantly, and nobody swims. Usually there’s gin rummy twice a week, Fridays and Sunday, for 5 cents a point. Sometimes dinner at Drai’s. But always the framework of a permanent schedule. “Call me a creature of habit,” suggests Link. He doesn’t drive, doesn’t move far from the Peninsula, doesn’t shock his system with unfamiliar experiences, doesn’t get close to people who converse in negatives. “That creates stress, which is the root of bad health. A routine means I don’t worry about what I have to do this afternoon, or should be doing later in the week, or must get done by next month. “That way, I hope to live to 100.” ... >“Everything went,” Link says. “I sold our home and our properties and moved into an apartment in Santa Monica.” But he did have the support of a wife and his children. “They knew that in both cases I had done the right thing,” he says. “So I really couldn’t have cared less what other people thought. I didn’t mind eating at McDonald’s.” He picked up new work as a $15,000-a-year public relations spokesman for National Distributing Co., his brother-in-law’s liquor business. At 64, for the first time in his adult life, Link was working for someone else; a hired hand, a salaried employee. “That was the saddest point of my life,” he says. “What I really cared about was what I had done to myself and my reputation and my self-respect. I could find excuses. I could come up with explanations. But deep down I knew. I blamed myself.” ... >Believe part of that. Friends suggest that engineering something for nothing today is a smart way of setting up deals for tomorrow. It has to do with quid pro quo, creating allegiances, issuing markers. Link is aware of his gift: “You approach this business the way you approach life. Positively. With a sense of fun, with humor, and with a certain amount of mental creativity. “But if you aren’t sincere and are involving yourself with perceptive people who know facts from bull----, then you’ve created a negative. Then your deal’s off.” ... >Link gets a 10-minute coif, stiff enough to last until July. ... >“You have the impression that [Link] irons his socks and gets dressed in the middle of the night just to go to the bathroom,” Davis says. “I think he truly believes in the saying that anybody will be in good spirits and good temper if they’re well dressed.” ... >“I miss the past to a degree,” he muses. He’s drinking Evian at lunch and saving his one Chardonnay for dinner. “But I’ve adjusted to what exists now. I’ve learned to prefer the day I’m living in. If you don’t grow with the times, you grow old with the past.” ... >Link has tallied his life. Its rewards are “family and friends who have supported me, loved me, cared for me.” The price has been no higher than “always giving a little more than you get.”
hengheng 2y ago
This is completely all over the place, like it would be to listen to an 87yo, but I'm not too sure about the author or editor.
- fifticon 2y ago
  this is what life is, at its finest. Not staying by a pool, but weaving and meandering this way. Though they say taste can't be argued.
NathanKP 2y ago
If, like me, you were curious about the visuals to go with this piece, it appears that this is the pool today: https://www.dorchestercollection.com/los-angeles/the-beverly-hills-hotel/pool https://www.dorchestercollection.com/los-angeles/the-beverly...
- brink 2y ago
  That's lovely
- urbandw311er 2y ago
  Good luck zooming into that photo on an iPhone
  - Kailhus 2y ago
    Made me laugh, “what the? No way, what if.. eh!? And maybe..” crash
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  I found a picture of him here: https://patrickdowns.photoshelter.com/image/I0000Hbr_mkY_p2A https://patrickdowns.photoshelter.com/image/I0000Hbr_mkY_p2A
  - rmnwski 2y ago
    > uses the hotel Rolls to do errands that's the way!
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I mean it's nice but spending all of my adult life there?
  - LudwigNagasena 2y ago
    Sounds better than spending whole life in an office.
permo-w 2y ago
>scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs do people not eat eggs anymore?
- bena 2y ago
  Eggs had a rough go of it in the 90s. There were studies where it seemed like even looking at an egg would cause your cholesterol to sky rocket and kill you.
  - colechristensen 2y ago
    The fed a bunch of cholesterol to rabbits who then got heart disease. But it turns out you’re not a rabbit and dietary cholesterol has nowhere near the same effect on humans.
    - Filligree 2y ago
      And also rabbits do not normally eat eggs, in fact aren’t even carnivores.
      - fifticon 2y ago
        how do you explain easter egg bunnies then??
    - jandrese 2y ago
      Who could have ever guessed that a herbivore would be poorly adapted to high amounts of cholesterol in their diet?
  - lynx97 2y ago
    One item on the rather long list of dietary advice/findings that have turned out to be wrong or overstated. Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest "findings". A local cabarettist had a 10 minute piece about this already 15 years ago. It seems, most dietary advice holds roughly 10 years, until someone else publishes another "study" and the press picks up on it to "entertain" the masses. Remember spinace and its supposed iron content? Or the milk industry doing an ad compaign (for decades!) to promote milk for school kids? The former was a misplaced comma, IIRC. And the latter was a blatant attempt to sell more product.
excalibur 2y ago
> Often he and the hostess, Bernice Philbin, would be the first two people there, and they would have a polite conversation before Irving took his place in his booth—the first half circle to your left as you came in—and ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk. TIL that my last 30+ years of egg eating has been a faux pas.
- bena 2y ago
  This might have been during the "eggs are bad for you" part of the egg cycle. So it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek jab at contemporary cultural mores.
  - lazide 2y ago
    My favorite part was when eggs were bad, then were good, then were bad again. Then people stopped talking about them at all. It was a very informative time for me personally.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  The article is from 1993. If you are old enough to remember that time, it was indeed when official nutritionist advice was a complete failure. Eggs were advised against because it was thought their high cholesterol levels raised blood cholesterol, which is false for most people who consume a moderate amount of eggs. This is the time during which fat was demonized (anyone remember SnackWell's???), the "foot pyramid" was the rule of the day that was based on eating lots of bread, pasta and carbs.
  - bena 2y ago
    I actually liked their devil's food cookie things. And after a quick glimpse at the internet, I am not alone in that. It's probably the major thing they're known for now.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    I don't remember a foot pyramid. There was the food pyramid, the $64000 pyramid, but nothing about feet. Just to have fun with an obvious simple typo
profsummergig 2y ago
I was thinking: "an entire article about a guy who used to tan at a hotel pool... when we start focusing on such trifles, it's usually a foreshadowing of some major upheaval coming." Then I saw the year of publication: 1993.
- 1024core 2y ago
  I wonder how much of the HN readership was not even born then....?
  - codetrotter 2y ago
    Probably a decent number. I first heard of HN around 2010 when I was in university. I assume that plenty of university students find their way to HN still. And that many of them will have been born around the mid-2000’s. I only barely make the cut myself to having been born a few years before 1993.
    - dbl000 2y ago
      Can confirm. Recent graduate who found HN during my second year at university.
      - dang 2y ago
        That's good! Do your friends know about / use HN? (Sorry for conscripting you as a guinea pig but it's hard to get this kind of info!)
        sureglymop 2y ago
        Person born in 2000 here. My friends and colleagues at university generally don't know about HN. Have told a few people about it but the only person I really converted into also becoming a regular reader is my dad. It's good because now whenever we see each other we have a lot of topics and stuff to discuss that we both read about here.
tolerance 2y ago
There is a strange sort of cerebral experience that elicits a visceral response about glimpses into ordinary life through plain black ink…err…fonts.
plasticsoprano 2y ago
He made it to 101 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/irving-link-obituary?id=24260835 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/irving-lin...
- Alex63 2y ago
  Sad, but not surprising given his age, that his son predeceased him by about a year. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/pressdemocrat/name/rand-link-obituary?id=15339662 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/pressdemocrat/name/rand...
jpmattia 2y ago
I can't be the only person curious about his Fortunescope: https://www.etsy.com/listing/719052863/antique-1935-fortunescope-fortune?show_sold_out_detail=1&ref=nla_listing_details https://www.etsy.com/listing/719052863/antique-1935-fortunes...
fxtentacle 2y ago
I find it wonderfully clichee that the guy who's job was linking vendors and customers was called Mr. Link.
- dmayle 2y ago
  It's called nominative determinism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
  - mmh0000 2y ago
    This is the fun but useless information I visit HN for! I can't wait (seriously, not sarcasm) to tell my wife about this.
  - memco 2y ago
    I’ve also seen “Aptronym” used for this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym
- ziptron 2y ago
  https://experts.mcmaster.ca/display/ironsga https://experts.mcmaster.ca/display/ironsga <-- A professor of steel making named Dr. Irons
  - jannyfer 2y ago
    Dr. Doctor https://www.nygh.on.ca/areas-care/maternal-newborn-and-paediatric-care/pregnancy-and-birth/giving-birth/meet-the-team/ https://www.nygh.on.ca/areas-care/maternal-newborn-and-paedi...
- samoots1 2y ago
  [dead]
dandsupernig 2y ago
[flagged]
IncreasePosts 2y ago
So he would just go hang out at a pool all day and avoid his wife and children? No wonder he lived to 101.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  I mean, most do by going to the office instead. I’m not sure how the pool is much different in that regard.
  - snailmailstare 2y ago
    Any man can avoid one boss, the trick is avoiding both.
trhway 2y ago
[flagged]
- trial3 2y ago
  you're earnestly wondering if there might have been discrimination of some kind at one of the most legendary Los Angeles celebrity institutions between between the 1950s and the 1990s?
  - trhway 2y ago
    i'm wondering how it works - does security simply kicks you out ? And i think today similar places are also not filled with poor people, and not for their lack of interest i'd guess.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      I suspect there are two or three layers of discrimination. There's probably a bit less overt racial discrimination now than there may have been in, say, the 50s, though what's left sets you up for the next two layers. You're going to have be judged (by hotel security) as "the right sort of person". This is clearly open to all sorts of discrimination (race, age, gender, social class, genetics and more), but I suspect that if you don't actively violate someone's mental model of what they want their poolside to look like, you might be OK. On top of that, you'll need to be able to spend money. This is not a coffee shop where a single americano gets you a seat for the day. If you're not regularly ordering drinks and food, I imagine that hotel security is going to ask you to move on after not that long.
HocusLocus 2y ago
If you enjoyed this consider William Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways". He is a quiet unassuming guy, or at least I assume he is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice that strangers open up to. As opposed to this monster of minutia that is one life, Moon traveled the back roads and collectively met hundreds of people and made conversation, gathered famous and obscure lore of the places he visited. He encountered them on their own turf and elsewhere. Even a chance meeting by a lake with a mosquito-bitten teenage runaway girl who opened up to him about the awful life from which she had just fled, and he made the 'courageous' decision to drive her across Wisconsin and deliver her safely to her grandmother's house in Green Bay. He is essentially a documentarian, and delivers the plain truth of the tales told to him. It is a transformative read.
- prasadjoglekar 2y ago
  Thank you for that recommendation.
- Loughla 2y ago
  It's really, really good. You made a good recommendation. Anyone reading this thread should check it out.
- robocat 2y ago
  > assume he is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice that strangers open up to. In my experience it is multiple traits that people open up to. Zero judgement, approachability, interest, friendliness and non-gossipy/tight-lipped about sensitive information. Most people present as judgemental. It's hard not to appear judgemental, and it's even harder not to be judgemental. I love non-judgemental people, and have managed to collect a few (mostly female) as friends. One or two get told the most intensely personal stuff
rfwhyte 2y ago
[flagged]
- dangus 2y ago
  I didn't get the impression that the article was a celebration of the man, it was more like a deep dive into the oddity of the whole thing. I think you're assigning an agenda where there is none. The author isn't trying to glorify the guy. The story is an interesting story because the circumstances are so unusual. I realize the scale of wealth skewed far upward from the typical working class person, but I will also point out that you don't really have to be very wealthy to afford to do nothing all day and buy meals at a hotel pool and not work. It sounds like the hotel was really just charging him money for his meals, it's not like he was staying overnight at the hotel. That's not really Elon Musk territory, that's attainable via the 4% rule [1] if you've got single digits of million dollars saved up (in 2025 dollars). Even less money is needed to live this kind of lifestyle if we are talking about low cost of living countries with beachy vibes like Thailand/Cambodia/Laos. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/four-percent-rule.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/four-percent-rule.asp
  - happyopossum 2y ago
    He had a long term lease on a cabana - that wasn’t cheap. Also ate lunch and bought drinks there. Not saying this was out of reach for anyone, but the cabana alone probably would have been for the vast majority of people.
    - urbandw311er 2y ago
      If you read the piece he was gifted the cabana
      - happyopossum 2y ago
        Only for 10 years
- scottyah 2y ago
punnerud 2y ago
Article summary: “ Irving V. Link spent 42 years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, where his meticulous daily routine of breakfast, sunbathing, and gin rummy became legendary. He was admired by hotel staff and Hollywood figures alike, symbolizing the timeless charm of a bygone era in Los Angeles. His life was deeply intertwined with the hotel’s evolution, reflecting the glamour of old Hollywood and the shifting dynamics of its clientele. The hotel’s closure by the Sultan of Brunei for renovations disrupted his routine and marked the end of an era. Link’s personal narrative weaves together memories of luxury, business intrigue, and cultural transformation. Ultimately, his story is a poignant meditation on the inevitability of change and the enduring power of tradition.”
- poglet 2y ago
  Thanks I was just thinking I wish Firefox had a 1 paragraph summary button next to the reader button. Then I came to comments and saw this.
  - d-sky 2y ago
    https://orbitbymozilla.com/ https://orbitbymozilla.com/
    - realfeel78 2y ago
      It's built into Safari now too.
- schiffern 2y ago
  >Ultimately, his story is a poignant meditation on the inevitability of change and the enduring power of tradition. I wish, occasionally, AI would close with >Ultimately, his story is a trite and shallow distraction which fails to leave a lasting impression upon the reader. The article may indeed be a "poignant meditation" (I liked it personally). but when AI shoehorns the last sentence of every summary into this exact same sort of vaguely-positive cliche, it becomes worthless as an uncorrupted signal of real information. A fun experiment would be to ask your favorite AI "Find me a recent article that is not worth reading and has no worthwhile journalistic, philosophical, emotional, or any other kind of takeaways." Then (separately) ask it to summarize the article and see how it closes...
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endoblast 2y ago
My goodness, 42 years of sun bathing at the same latitude as Tunisia. Should he have got skin cancer or did he benefit from all the naturally produced Vitamin D?
- reddalo 2y ago
  I think he benefitted from the Vitamin D, since he died at 101.
  - endoblast 2y ago
    Well I agree, and I myself supplement with D3; however the mainstream advice is to avoid sun exposure, for example: https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-prevention/ https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-prevention/ Clearly more research is needed.
    - zeroday28 2y ago
      Insufficient sun exposure is responsible for approximately 340,000 deaths annually in the United States and 480,000 deaths annually in Europe, while non-melanoma skin cancers account for 63,700 deaths worldwide. Skin cancer only occurs due to excessive exposure combined with a weakened immune system, which is really rare. You're more likely to die in a traffic accident or from insufficient sun exposure than to ever develop skin cancer.
      - theshackleford 2y ago
        > You're more likely to die in a traffic accident or from insufficient sun exposure than to ever develop skin cancer. In your neck of the woods maybe. This is not accurate everywhere. It’s the complete opposite where I live.
        fragmede 2y ago
        Which is where?
irrational 2y ago
> Then Irving would either walk back home to his wife and two children What the... he'd leave his wife at home with the kids while he hung out all day at the pool with "magnificent-looking young women, full of theatrical drive" and eat all his meals at the hotel?
- compiler-guy 2y ago
  In those days you didn’t get divorced, you “stayed together” for the children. So they were effectively separated most of those years. Just informally so.
  - colordrops 2y ago
    Many people still "stay together" for the children.
    - ForTheKidz 2y ago
      I have no doubt this is a widespread behavior, but I do have doubts as to whether or not this benefits children. Children seem to benefit primarily from watching relationships that genuinely make both parents happy. There's very little evidence to support that faking it yields results of children reacting as if you weren't faking it. You might as well divorce.
      - zdragnar 2y ago
        My friend in high school suffered from depression in part because he was well aware of that fact that his parents were only staying together until he graduated. Despite any attempt to put a rational face on it, he believed his existence was the source of his parents' unhappiness. Another friend of mine is doing this with his wife right now. He's utterly miserable, but the racial stereotype of the missing black father weighs so heavily in his mind that he's resigned to just counting down the years (despite my own attempt to convey the above story).
        2y ago
kristianp 2y ago
Apparently the Eagles song, "Hotel California" is loosely based on the fokelore around this hotel.
- rzz3 2y ago
  I always thought it was about the Hotel California in Todos Santos, México.
lordleft 2y ago
Marvelous article. I was prepared to read about an eccentric and mild recluse but Irving seems to been witness to extraordinary things.
tanujsh979 2y ago
Amazing read!
sensanabae 2y ago
[dead]
kelnos 2y ago
> ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk. It's funny how much life cycles. I do kinda remember a phase where people were eating a "healthier" breakfast of some kind of fruit, and when granola became popular, and when milk fat was considered the worst thing you could do to your body. But now eggs are fine, again. Great, even.
- b800h 2y ago
  I was immediately struck by this remark too. Were eggs particularly unfashionable in the early 1990s in the USA? Apparently so.
  - morsch 2y ago
    Egg consumption was considered to lead to high cholesterol levels and thus linked to cardiovascular disease. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4632449/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4632449/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/1999/09/21/return-of-the-good-egg/9c40bdfc-9072-49ee-b0e8-6239167623e8/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/19... https://australianfoodtimeline.com.au/egg-consumption/ https://australianfoodtimeline.com.au/egg-consumption/
    - ekianjo 2y ago
      The idea that granola would be healthier is rather strange
      - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
        One of the best examples of a food industry (grains) being able to influence eating habits to their benefit. Anyway, the phrase "healhty" in relation to food is a bit of a trigger phrase to me nowadays, healthy how? It's completely lacking in nuance. Apples are healthy, except when you eat 200 seeds at which point the cyanide gets to a lethal dose. Granola is healthy, unless you eat it three times a day and little else. You get the idea. The problem there is "x is healthy" makes people overconsume it and ignore anything that isn't marked "healthy". "healthy" eating takes work, study, and moderation.
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EfficientDude 2y ago
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lqet 2y ago
Reading the article, looking at pictures from the Beverly Hills Hotel in the 70ies and 80ies, and considering the fact that Irving V. Link acted in a movie once, I get the strong feeling that an episode of Columbo in which Link played himself as a wrongfully accused prime suspect (saved by Columbo in the end) would've been excellent. Just imagine Peter Falk and Link conversing next to that pool: https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/travel/discover/photos/213/70875/1600/2021BHHPoolv1HR.jpg https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/travel/discover/photos...
- ubermonkey 2y ago
  Oh man YES.
- nelblu 2y ago
  The picture of that pool reminded me of this Columbo episode (S4 Exercise in Fatality) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRoVLfuADqw&t=220s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRoVLfuADqw&t=220s
motohagiography 2y ago
what stands out of me is a sense of place the hotel represented that isn't present anywhere today. if you were at the hotel when something occurred, the hotel was a part of america and by being there, you were there, a small part of the story. the starkness in the story to me is that the culture today lacks belonging. no matter how many followers you have, you will never belong anywhere the way this Irving character had become a fixture. he was a part of the story. maybe I'm just nostalgic, but there's an essential dynamic in the story that isn't present in the culture now. the hotel was a place with durable meaning that cohered in the culture over a long period of time. I couldn't name one place now that isn't just a theme park to its former meaning, full of toursts taking selfies, people who themselves know they don't belong somewhere. the thrill of taking photos of themselves or their food is the same as they might get from shoplifting a lip balm. maybe what's changed in the culture is the people lack belonging and go from place to place like this stealing bits of meaning without their lives becoming any richer, or particularly less poor. the physical places themselves didn't change, but I think the identity of people who use places to tresspass and share with their imaginary followers somewhere else has hollowed out the presence and meaning of these places, and that is what has made characters with romantic and interesting lives like this Irving guy something from the past. maybe people just don't act like they belong anymore.
- Michelangelo11 2y ago
  Wonderful comment. Thank you. I think the "theme park to its former meaning" line is very right.
jerrycruncher 2y ago
What a lovely, sumptuously-written piece. Thank you for sharing!

273 points by zeveb 2y ago

These are the kinda articles I like to just read the last paragraph. So much work to paint some annoying ass story; sorry, I skipped to the end haha.

16mb 2y ago
I thought the journey was well-written, captivating and worth the read.
- psyclobe 2y ago
  Huh, maybe I should give it a go...
kittikitti 2y ago
I'm still trying to find the reason this was posted and boosted, instead of some very important AI news coming out recently.
- yownie 2y ago
  probably because we're all sick of AI news

deleted 2y ago

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pvg 2y ago

https://archive.is/eRc3M https://archive.is/eRc3M

blakesterz 2y ago

I don't know why I found this so interesting to read. After the first few paragraphs I wondered why this was in The New Yorker, afterall, this is about a place in CA. The answer did appear, eventually... “My story begins on the Lower East Side of New York,” he said...

tmiku 2y ago
The NY specificity implied by the publication name is archaic. Apart from the event listings or performance/exhibit reviews, The New Yorker's long form coverage has been nationally (sometimes globally) focused for decades, albeit through the lens of what America's coastal elites find interesting.
- dhosek 2y ago
  There’s a great scene in the movie World’s Greatest Dad where Robin Williams plays a frustrated writer. Another teacher at the school where he teaches gets a story in The New Yorker¹ and Robin Williams’s character tells him something along the lines of “how nice, I hope your next one gets published somewhere that isn’t regional.”² ⸻ 1. This is generally considered the pinnacle of literary short fiction publishing. 2. He was, of course, being ironic (and bitterly jealous). As an aside, the movie is a brilliant dark comedy, written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait who’s come a long way from his Police Academy days.
  - ubermonkey 2y ago
    Yeah, it's kind of a lost idea now, but through the 80s and 90s the absolute best places to get a story published were, in no particular order: * The New Yorker * Harper's * The Atlantic * and, believe it or not, Playboy In re: the latter, see https://ew.com/books/playboy-hugh-hefner-famous-authors/ https://ew.com/books/playboy-hugh-hefner-famous-authors/
    - dhosek 2y ago
      Hugh Hefner was a surprising patron of the arts. Playboy made so much money that he poured it into funding some amazing writing (while the standard joke was “I read Playboy for the articles,” the articles were generally quite amazing) not to mention funding some significant work in printing and typographic technology (one example: the magazine used Palatino for its text and when the type on the gravure pages didn’t match the type on the offset pages, they had a custom version of Palatino made to correct the discrepancy). Those three are still the top tier, at least when it comes to money for short fiction, although it’s depressing to read stuff from the 30s which has dollar amounts attached to publications and realize that even in nominal dollars, those would be better paychecks than most writers receive today.

bryanlarsen 2y ago

(1993). The hotel reopened in 1996 but Irving never returned. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...

owenversteeg 2y ago
https://archive.ph/LmhBD https://archive.ph/LmhBD What a lovely article. A lot to learn from that old man. I quoted a few things, for the HN crowd (myself included) that often reads comments and seldom reads articles: >He’s also a youthful, gentle man glowing sans peur et sans reproche while bringing a moment of grace, manners and style to largely impolite, undignified and profane times. That’s why people, even the known and confident, seek admission to his court, to be touched by politesse: Because he’s an escape, a salve that somehow, just for a moment, delivers us from what’s out there, which is harsh and threatening. Or as friend and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik says: He is our perception of the ideal grandfather. Or how grandfather would be if he left grandmother home. “People . . . ask to meet Irving just so they can say they had at last met a man who has it all figured out,” says Gopnik, now living in Paris. He sees Link as a true California type as much as any snazzy actor or wealthy courtesan. “He puts me in mind of some great performance piece. Irving is his own creation.” ... >Yet Link’s daily ritual hasn’t gone away. He walks two miles from home each morning to the hotel, for granola, bananas and berries over The Times and the trades. One cup of decaf. Then onto Wilshire and Camden and Little Joe’s barbershop, where little Giuseppe Bausoue (“I make house calls to Frank Sinatra”) coiffures, blow-dries and sprays Link’s pearl-white hair into a stiff sculpture. Max, chauffeuring the hotel’s black Rolls-Royce, has Link back at the Peninsula around 9:30 a.m. Upstairs to the spa, into a terry robe and slippers, and out to a cabana for the first of dozens of incoming and outgoing phone calls. Maybe a turkey sandwich lunch alongside the pool where tans are oiled umber, cellular phones tinkle incessantly, and nobody swims. Usually there’s gin rummy twice a week, Fridays and Sunday, for 5 cents a point. Sometimes dinner at Drai’s. But always the framework of a permanent schedule. “Call me a creature of habit,” suggests Link. He doesn’t drive, doesn’t move far from the Peninsula, doesn’t shock his system with unfamiliar experiences, doesn’t get close to people who converse in negatives. “That creates stress, which is the root of bad health. A routine means I don’t worry about what I have to do this afternoon, or should be doing later in the week, or must get done by next month. “That way, I hope to live to 100.” ... >“Everything went,” Link says. “I sold our home and our properties and moved into an apartment in Santa Monica.” But he did have the support of a wife and his children. “They knew that in both cases I had done the right thing,” he says. “So I really couldn’t have cared less what other people thought. I didn’t mind eating at McDonald’s.” He picked up new work as a $15,000-a-year public relations spokesman for National Distributing Co., his brother-in-law’s liquor business. At 64, for the first time in his adult life, Link was working for someone else; a hired hand, a salaried employee. “That was the saddest point of my life,” he says. “What I really cared about was what I had done to myself and my reputation and my self-respect. I could find excuses. I could come up with explanations. But deep down I knew. I blamed myself.” ... >Believe part of that. Friends suggest that engineering something for nothing today is a smart way of setting up deals for tomorrow. It has to do with quid pro quo, creating allegiances, issuing markers. Link is aware of his gift: “You approach this business the way you approach life. Positively. With a sense of fun, with humor, and with a certain amount of mental creativity. “But if you aren’t sincere and are involving yourself with perceptive people who know facts from bull----, then you’ve created a negative. Then your deal’s off.” ... >Link gets a 10-minute coif, stiff enough to last until July. ... >“You have the impression that [Link] irons his socks and gets dressed in the middle of the night just to go to the bathroom,” Davis says. “I think he truly believes in the saying that anybody will be in good spirits and good temper if they’re well dressed.” ... >“I miss the past to a degree,” he muses. He’s drinking Evian at lunch and saving his one Chardonnay for dinner. “But I’ve adjusted to what exists now. I’ve learned to prefer the day I’m living in. If you don’t grow with the times, you grow old with the past.” ... >Link has tallied his life. Its rewards are “family and friends who have supported me, loved me, cared for me.” The price has been no higher than “always giving a little more than you get.”

hengheng 2y ago

This is completely all over the place, like it would be to listen to an 87yo, but I'm not too sure about the author or editor.

fifticon 2y ago
this is what life is, at its finest. Not staying by a pool, but weaving and meandering this way. Though they say taste can't be argued.

NathanKP 2y ago

If, like me, you were curious about the visuals to go with this piece, it appears that this is the pool today: https://www.dorchestercollection.com/los-angeles/the-beverly-hills-hotel/pool https://www.dorchestercollection.com/los-angeles/the-beverly...

brink 2y ago
That's lovely
urbandw311er 2y ago
Good luck zooming into that photo on an iPhone
- Kailhus 2y ago
  Made me laugh, “what the? No way, what if.. eh!? And maybe..” crash
mixmastamyk 2y ago
I found a picture of him here: https://patrickdowns.photoshelter.com/image/I0000Hbr_mkY_p2A https://patrickdowns.photoshelter.com/image/I0000Hbr_mkY_p2A
- rmnwski 2y ago
  > uses the hotel Rolls to do errands that's the way!
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
I mean it's nice but spending all of my adult life there?
- LudwigNagasena 2y ago
  Sounds better than spending whole life in an office.

permo-w 2y ago

>scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs do people not eat eggs anymore?

bena 2y ago
Eggs had a rough go of it in the 90s. There were studies where it seemed like even looking at an egg would cause your cholesterol to sky rocket and kill you.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  The fed a bunch of cholesterol to rabbits who then got heart disease. But it turns out you’re not a rabbit and dietary cholesterol has nowhere near the same effect on humans.
  - Filligree 2y ago
    And also rabbits do not normally eat eggs, in fact aren’t even carnivores.
    - fifticon 2y ago
      how do you explain easter egg bunnies then??
  - jandrese 2y ago
    Who could have ever guessed that a herbivore would be poorly adapted to high amounts of cholesterol in their diet?
- lynx97 2y ago
  One item on the rather long list of dietary advice/findings that have turned out to be wrong or overstated. Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest "findings". A local cabarettist had a 10 minute piece about this already 15 years ago. It seems, most dietary advice holds roughly 10 years, until someone else publishes another "study" and the press picks up on it to "entertain" the masses. Remember spinace and its supposed iron content? Or the milk industry doing an ad compaign (for decades!) to promote milk for school kids? The former was a misplaced comma, IIRC. And the latter was a blatant attempt to sell more product.

excalibur 2y ago

> Often he and the hostess, Bernice Philbin, would be the first two people there, and they would have a polite conversation before Irving took his place in his booth—the first half circle to your left as you came in—and ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk. TIL that my last 30+ years of egg eating has been a faux pas.

bena 2y ago
This might have been during the "eggs are bad for you" part of the egg cycle. So it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek jab at contemporary cultural mores.
- lazide 2y ago
  My favorite part was when eggs were bad, then were good, then were bad again. Then people stopped talking about them at all. It was a very informative time for me personally.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
The article is from 1993. If you are old enough to remember that time, it was indeed when official nutritionist advice was a complete failure. Eggs were advised against because it was thought their high cholesterol levels raised blood cholesterol, which is false for most people who consume a moderate amount of eggs. This is the time during which fat was demonized (anyone remember SnackWell's???), the "foot pyramid" was the rule of the day that was based on eating lots of bread, pasta and carbs.
- bena 2y ago
  I actually liked their devil's food cookie things. And after a quick glimpse at the internet, I am not alone in that. It's probably the major thing they're known for now.
- dylan604 2y ago
  I don't remember a foot pyramid. There was the food pyramid, the $64000 pyramid, but nothing about feet. Just to have fun with an obvious simple typo

profsummergig 2y ago

I was thinking: "an entire article about a guy who used to tan at a hotel pool... when we start focusing on such trifles, it's usually a foreshadowing of some major upheaval coming." Then I saw the year of publication: 1993.

1024core 2y ago
I wonder how much of the HN readership was not even born then....?
- codetrotter 2y ago
  Probably a decent number. I first heard of HN around 2010 when I was in university. I assume that plenty of university students find their way to HN still. And that many of them will have been born around the mid-2000’s. I only barely make the cut myself to having been born a few years before 1993.
  - dbl000 2y ago
    Can confirm. Recent graduate who found HN during my second year at university.
    - dang 2y ago
      That's good! Do your friends know about / use HN? (Sorry for conscripting you as a guinea pig but it's hard to get this kind of info!)
      - sureglymop 2y ago
        Person born in 2000 here. My friends and colleagues at university generally don't know about HN. Have told a few people about it but the only person I really converted into also becoming a regular reader is my dad. It's good because now whenever we see each other we have a lot of topics and stuff to discuss that we both read about here.

tolerance 2y ago

There is a strange sort of cerebral experience that elicits a visceral response about glimpses into ordinary life through plain black ink…err…fonts.

plasticsoprano 2y ago

He made it to 101 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/irving-link-obituary?id=24260835 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/irving-lin...

Alex63 2y ago
Sad, but not surprising given his age, that his son predeceased him by about a year. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/pressdemocrat/name/rand-link-obituary?id=15339662 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/pressdemocrat/name/rand...

jpmattia 2y ago

I can't be the only person curious about his Fortunescope: https://www.etsy.com/listing/719052863/antique-1935-fortunescope-fortune?show_sold_out_detail=1&ref=nla_listing_details https://www.etsy.com/listing/719052863/antique-1935-fortunes...

fxtentacle 2y ago

I find it wonderfully clichee that the guy who's job was linking vendors and customers was called Mr. Link.

dmayle 2y ago
It's called nominative determinism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
- mmh0000 2y ago
  This is the fun but useless information I visit HN for! I can't wait (seriously, not sarcasm) to tell my wife about this.
- memco 2y ago
  I’ve also seen “Aptronym” used for this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym
ziptron 2y ago
https://experts.mcmaster.ca/display/ironsga https://experts.mcmaster.ca/display/ironsga <-- A professor of steel making named Dr. Irons
- jannyfer 2y ago
  Dr. Doctor https://www.nygh.on.ca/areas-care/maternal-newborn-and-paediatric-care/pregnancy-and-birth/giving-birth/meet-the-team/ https://www.nygh.on.ca/areas-care/maternal-newborn-and-paedi...
samoots1 2y ago
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dandsupernig 2y ago

[flagged]

IncreasePosts 2y ago

So he would just go hang out at a pool all day and avoid his wife and children? No wonder he lived to 101.

Aeolun 2y ago
I mean, most do by going to the office instead. I’m not sure how the pool is much different in that regard.
- snailmailstare 2y ago
  Any man can avoid one boss, the trick is avoiding both.

trhway 2y ago

[flagged]

trial3 2y ago
you're earnestly wondering if there might have been discrimination of some kind at one of the most legendary Los Angeles celebrity institutions between between the 1950s and the 1990s?
- trhway 2y ago
  i'm wondering how it works - does security simply kicks you out ? And i think today similar places are also not filled with poor people, and not for their lack of interest i'd guess.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    I suspect there are two or three layers of discrimination. There's probably a bit less overt racial discrimination now than there may have been in, say, the 50s, though what's left sets you up for the next two layers. You're going to have be judged (by hotel security) as "the right sort of person". This is clearly open to all sorts of discrimination (race, age, gender, social class, genetics and more), but I suspect that if you don't actively violate someone's mental model of what they want their poolside to look like, you might be OK. On top of that, you'll need to be able to spend money. This is not a coffee shop where a single americano gets you a seat for the day. If you're not regularly ordering drinks and food, I imagine that hotel security is going to ask you to move on after not that long.

HocusLocus 2y ago

If you enjoyed this consider William Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways". He is a quiet unassuming guy, or at least I assume he is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice that strangers open up to. As opposed to this monster of minutia that is one life, Moon traveled the back roads and collectively met hundreds of people and made conversation, gathered famous and obscure lore of the places he visited. He encountered them on their own turf and elsewhere. Even a chance meeting by a lake with a mosquito-bitten teenage runaway girl who opened up to him about the awful life from which she had just fled, and he made the 'courageous' decision to drive her across Wisconsin and deliver her safely to her grandmother's house in Green Bay. He is essentially a documentarian, and delivers the plain truth of the tales told to him. It is a transformative read.

prasadjoglekar 2y ago
Thank you for that recommendation.
Loughla 2y ago
It's really, really good. You made a good recommendation. Anyone reading this thread should check it out.
robocat 2y ago
> assume he is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice that strangers open up to. In my experience it is multiple traits that people open up to. Zero judgement, approachability, interest, friendliness and non-gossipy/tight-lipped about sensitive information. Most people present as judgemental. It's hard not to appear judgemental, and it's even harder not to be judgemental. I love non-judgemental people, and have managed to collect a few (mostly female) as friends. One or two get told the most intensely personal stuff

rfwhyte 2y ago

[flagged]

dangus 2y ago
I didn't get the impression that the article was a celebration of the man, it was more like a deep dive into the oddity of the whole thing. I think you're assigning an agenda where there is none. The author isn't trying to glorify the guy. The story is an interesting story because the circumstances are so unusual. I realize the scale of wealth skewed far upward from the typical working class person, but I will also point out that you don't really have to be very wealthy to afford to do nothing all day and buy meals at a hotel pool and not work. It sounds like the hotel was really just charging him money for his meals, it's not like he was staying overnight at the hotel. That's not really Elon Musk territory, that's attainable via the 4% rule [1] if you've got single digits of million dollars saved up (in 2025 dollars). Even less money is needed to live this kind of lifestyle if we are talking about low cost of living countries with beachy vibes like Thailand/Cambodia/Laos. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/four-percent-rule.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/four-percent-rule.asp
- happyopossum 2y ago
  He had a long term lease on a cabana - that wasn’t cheap. Also ate lunch and bought drinks there. Not saying this was out of reach for anyone, but the cabana alone probably would have been for the vast majority of people.
  - urbandw311er 2y ago
    If you read the piece he was gifted the cabana
    - happyopossum 2y ago
      Only for 10 years
scottyah 2y ago

punnerud 2y ago

Article summary: “ Irving V. Link spent 42 years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, where his meticulous daily routine of breakfast, sunbathing, and gin rummy became legendary. He was admired by hotel staff and Hollywood figures alike, symbolizing the timeless charm of a bygone era in Los Angeles. His life was deeply intertwined with the hotel’s evolution, reflecting the glamour of old Hollywood and the shifting dynamics of its clientele. The hotel’s closure by the Sultan of Brunei for renovations disrupted his routine and marked the end of an era. Link’s personal narrative weaves together memories of luxury, business intrigue, and cultural transformation. Ultimately, his story is a poignant meditation on the inevitability of change and the enduring power of tradition.”

poglet 2y ago
Thanks I was just thinking I wish Firefox had a 1 paragraph summary button next to the reader button. Then I came to comments and saw this.
- d-sky 2y ago
  https://orbitbymozilla.com/ https://orbitbymozilla.com/
  - realfeel78 2y ago
    It's built into Safari now too.
schiffern 2y ago
>Ultimately, his story is a poignant meditation on the inevitability of change and the enduring power of tradition. I wish, occasionally, AI would close with >Ultimately, his story is a trite and shallow distraction which fails to leave a lasting impression upon the reader. The article may indeed be a "poignant meditation" (I liked it personally). but when AI shoehorns the last sentence of every summary into this exact same sort of vaguely-positive cliche, it becomes worthless as an uncorrupted signal of real information. A fun experiment would be to ask your favorite AI "Find me a recent article that is not worth reading and has no worthwhile journalistic, philosophical, emotional, or any other kind of takeaways." Then (separately) ask it to summarize the article and see how it closes...

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endoblast 2y ago

My goodness, 42 years of sun bathing at the same latitude as Tunisia. Should he have got skin cancer or did he benefit from all the naturally produced Vitamin D?

reddalo 2y ago
I think he benefitted from the Vitamin D, since he died at 101.
- endoblast 2y ago
  Well I agree, and I myself supplement with D3; however the mainstream advice is to avoid sun exposure, for example: https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-prevention/ https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-prevention/ Clearly more research is needed.
  - zeroday28 2y ago
    Insufficient sun exposure is responsible for approximately 340,000 deaths annually in the United States and 480,000 deaths annually in Europe, while non-melanoma skin cancers account for 63,700 deaths worldwide. Skin cancer only occurs due to excessive exposure combined with a weakened immune system, which is really rare. You're more likely to die in a traffic accident or from insufficient sun exposure than to ever develop skin cancer.
    - theshackleford 2y ago
      > You're more likely to die in a traffic accident or from insufficient sun exposure than to ever develop skin cancer. In your neck of the woods maybe. This is not accurate everywhere. It’s the complete opposite where I live.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        Which is where?

irrational 2y ago

> Then Irving would either walk back home to his wife and two children What the... he'd leave his wife at home with the kids while he hung out all day at the pool with "magnificent-looking young women, full of theatrical drive" and eat all his meals at the hotel?

compiler-guy 2y ago
In those days you didn’t get divorced, you “stayed together” for the children. So they were effectively separated most of those years. Just informally so.
- colordrops 2y ago
  Many people still "stay together" for the children.
  - ForTheKidz 2y ago
    I have no doubt this is a widespread behavior, but I do have doubts as to whether or not this benefits children. Children seem to benefit primarily from watching relationships that genuinely make both parents happy. There's very little evidence to support that faking it yields results of children reacting as if you weren't faking it. You might as well divorce.
    - zdragnar 2y ago
      My friend in high school suffered from depression in part because he was well aware of that fact that his parents were only staying together until he graduated. Despite any attempt to put a rational face on it, he believed his existence was the source of his parents' unhappiness. Another friend of mine is doing this with his wife right now. He's utterly miserable, but the racial stereotype of the missing black father weighs so heavily in his mind that he's resigned to just counting down the years (despite my own attempt to convey the above story).
      - 2y ago

kristianp 2y ago

Apparently the Eagles song, "Hotel California" is loosely based on the fokelore around this hotel.

rzz3 2y ago
I always thought it was about the Hotel California in Todos Santos, México.

lordleft 2y ago

Marvelous article. I was prepared to read about an eccentric and mild recluse but Irving seems to been witness to extraordinary things.

tanujsh979 2y ago

Amazing read!

sensanabae 2y ago

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kelnos 2y ago

> ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk. It's funny how much life cycles. I do kinda remember a phase where people were eating a "healthier" breakfast of some kind of fruit, and when granola became popular, and when milk fat was considered the worst thing you could do to your body. But now eggs are fine, again. Great, even.

b800h 2y ago
I was immediately struck by this remark too. Were eggs particularly unfashionable in the early 1990s in the USA? Apparently so.
- morsch 2y ago
  Egg consumption was considered to lead to high cholesterol levels and thus linked to cardiovascular disease. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4632449/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4632449/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/1999/09/21/return-of-the-good-egg/9c40bdfc-9072-49ee-b0e8-6239167623e8/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/19... https://australianfoodtimeline.com.au/egg-consumption/ https://australianfoodtimeline.com.au/egg-consumption/
  - ekianjo 2y ago
    The idea that granola would be healthier is rather strange
    - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      One of the best examples of a food industry (grains) being able to influence eating habits to their benefit. Anyway, the phrase "healhty" in relation to food is a bit of a trigger phrase to me nowadays, healthy how? It's completely lacking in nuance. Apples are healthy, except when you eat 200 seeds at which point the cyanide gets to a lethal dose. Granola is healthy, unless you eat it three times a day and little else. You get the idea. The problem there is "x is healthy" makes people overconsume it and ignore anything that isn't marked "healthy". "healthy" eating takes work, study, and moderation.

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EfficientDude 2y ago

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lqet 2y ago

Reading the article, looking at pictures from the Beverly Hills Hotel in the 70ies and 80ies, and considering the fact that Irving V. Link acted in a movie once, I get the strong feeling that an episode of Columbo in which Link played himself as a wrongfully accused prime suspect (saved by Columbo in the end) would've been excellent. Just imagine Peter Falk and Link conversing next to that pool: https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/travel/discover/photos/213/70875/1600/2021BHHPoolv1HR.jpg https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/travel/discover/photos...

ubermonkey 2y ago
Oh man YES.
nelblu 2y ago
The picture of that pool reminded me of this Columbo episode (S4 Exercise in Fatality) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRoVLfuADqw&t=220s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRoVLfuADqw&t=220s

motohagiography 2y ago

what stands out of me is a sense of place the hotel represented that isn't present anywhere today. if you were at the hotel when something occurred, the hotel was a part of america and by being there, you were there, a small part of the story. the starkness in the story to me is that the culture today lacks belonging. no matter how many followers you have, you will never belong anywhere the way this Irving character had become a fixture. he was a part of the story. maybe I'm just nostalgic, but there's an essential dynamic in the story that isn't present in the culture now. the hotel was a place with durable meaning that cohered in the culture over a long period of time. I couldn't name one place now that isn't just a theme park to its former meaning, full of toursts taking selfies, people who themselves know they don't belong somewhere. the thrill of taking photos of themselves or their food is the same as they might get from shoplifting a lip balm. maybe what's changed in the culture is the people lack belonging and go from place to place like this stealing bits of meaning without their lives becoming any richer, or particularly less poor. the physical places themselves didn't change, but I think the identity of people who use places to tresspass and share with their imaginary followers somewhere else has hollowed out the presence and meaning of these places, and that is what has made characters with romantic and interesting lives like this Irving guy something from the past. maybe people just don't act like they belong anymore.

Michelangelo11 2y ago
Wonderful comment. Thank you. I think the "theme park to its former meaning" line is very right.

jerrycruncher 2y ago

What a lovely, sumptuously-written piece. Thank you for sharing!