Heck Of A Guy

Leonard Cohen’s Back
- As Seen From The Good Seats

This photo, from an October 11, 2007 post, was itself interesting enough to catch my eye. The blogger, seated behind Leonard Cohen and Anjani Thomas, has, obviously, snapped a photo from his perspective.

In the title of his post, he identifies Leonard Cohen and Anjani Thomas. Below the photo, he enters only the brief, self-effacing text, “Yes, I was pretty intimidated …” followed by his signature, “Craig.”

That is a nicely done, clever blog entry.

The post, however, gains another a level of complexity and impressiveness when seen in its entirety, as in the screenshot below.

Oh, That Craig

“Craig,” it turns out, is Craig Alexander Newmark, as in the Craig, as in the founder of Craigslist, the handy to the point of indispensable online amalgam of classified ads, online community, forums, and more with estimated revenues of $25 million in 2006 to possibly $150 million in 2007,¹ posting in cnewmark, his personal blog.²

Well, Craig might have been intimidated, but if I had been there it would have been, I assure you, a different story.

Yep, I’d be the guy intimidated by the guy intimidated by Leonard Cohen and Anjani Thomas.

Footnotes

1. Revenue estimates are from sources quoted in Wikipedia, which is also the reference for the following data: Craigslist, a throwback, in many ways, to the earliest online, Whole Earth Catalog-flavored communities such as the WELL, and Usenet, began as a list of social event around San Francisco now operates in approximately 450 cities in 50 countries and serves over five billion page views per month to ten million unique visitors. With over ten million new classified advertisements each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium. The site receives over 500,000 new job listings each month. The classified advertisements range from traditional buy/sell ads and community announcements, to personal ads and even erotic services. ↩
2. While Craig’s post doesn’t specify the occasion, my best guess is that it was the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’s Book of Longing based on Leonard Cohen’s book of poems performed October 9, 2007 at Stanford. ↩

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