Joe emails:
Another idea related to Delice a bit: LUKEAPALOOZA, the multi-media tour of Luke Ford’s LA!
Beginning with lunch at Luke’s favorite French bistro, climb into the original LUKE FORD SERIAL KILLER VAN (TM) and watch Luke’s life come alive:
* Cram yourselves into LUKE’S HOVEL ™ for an uncensored session on Luke’s webcam (DVD’s may be purchased at the end of the tour)!
* Have yourself immortalized by the infamous CAMERA OF DEATH! ™ (prints available for purchase after the tour)
* Have your photo and words of YOUR wisdom included on Luke’s blog, lukeford.net!
* Daven with Luke Ford at his "secret" shul!
* See LA like you’ve NEVER seen it before!!!!!
DO LUKEAPALOOZA–‘CAUSE YOU HAVEN’T DONE L.A. TILL YOU’VE DONE LUKE FORD!!!!
And, perhaps you could introduce them to some of your blogger/screenwriter/actor/etc. friends–Mickey Kaus, Sandra T.L., Amy Alkon, etc., assuming they’re up for it–take them out for coffee, offer them a percentage of tour revenue or tell them it’s the mobile equivalent of a "rent party" for you and hope they’ll do it for you out of sympathy, etc.
An evening version of this tour could start at Delice (the French restaurant this time) and take people on your night haunts, including being with you as you do the paparazzo thing–perhaps you could introduce your tour
guests to the celebrities you are trying to photograph, assuming they’re up for it.
Oh and, in keeping with what I’ve been telling you, you arrange an affiliate deal with any/all establishments that you’d take people to, like Delice, i.e. a kickback, as tour-guides have done since time-immemorial, no doubt.
If you don’t like the SENSATIONALIZED VERSION of this thing, you could just make it A Day in the Life of Luke Ford Tour or whatever.
As part of these things, you’d make sure to get them to sign whatever waiver might be needed so you can get some good blog material out of it, because it would be a real Day in the Life of Luke Ford, after all.
The nice thing about all this is you could try it for free–just offer it to some of readers who are friends of yours or who you’re connected to and see if they like it. And/or, think up an afternoon’s worth of stuff to do and ask on your blog if people would be interested in such a thing for $X (or ask them to tell you if interested how much they’d pay for the experience).
Oh, and if your van can handle it, as part of this, you could take people to Pasadena to shop at those places you keep advertising without getting revenue for the ads…hopefully arranging to make some money from it, though, for a change?
Speaking of your van handling it, you could do a Universal Studios style thing, where you have your van "break down" nearby and you need to get towed and you’d call Nick, he’d come by and tow you all in the van to the tour’s endpoint–you’d have arranged it all before, so Nick would be there, you’d get a cheap price on the tow and you could shill for Universal Tires and your tourists would get the ride of a lifetime…or something.
You could perhaps exchange some blog advertising for Universal Tires and/or Nick’s towing business for arranging such towing.
Oh and for the multimedia aspect, I guess you could have some seatback DVD players in the car showing highlights of your TV appearances over the years, etc. And/or have someone make a little promotional reel including shots of your LA Weekly cover and the various other articles you’ve appeared in plus the video stuff, etc.
Use this too to sell copies of your books–after the tour and off your blog: 4 lucky readers who buy this week will be chosen to do LukeAPalooza for FREE! You get the idea.
At the hovel (or outside, on the grass) you could teach the tourists how they too can be like you and have their very own blog and…even make money with it (so, even if they have blogs, they probably don’t know how to do that, and you could teach them).
It might take a bit of working out, but I have a feeling you could do it, pick up some bucks, have a good time and perhaps meet interesting people. And, since your blog gets read in LA and out, you could get people from all over who might be willing to take a ride with you.
And, perhaps doing this could even tie in with the reality show.
But I think it’s something you could do on your own that would make you a bit of money and keep you well-fed at Delice.
P.S. Not sure this is viable but another idea, similar to doing tours of the star’s homes and the like is: instead, the same idea but of top-LA bloggers, which would include lunch/dinner/coffee with at least one such blogger.
Obviously, you’d arrange ahead of time to get groups of people who like certain bloggers, etc.
P.P.S. You could have dramatic-readings of some of your blog posts playing as you go by certain locations, e.g. the "rabbi will see you now" as you drive down Pico, pointing out the shuls, perhaps talking about being thrown out of this one, and then that one.
The basic idea is: you don’t need anyone else, you are your own reality show.
You could arrange to have someone sitting next to you while you drive or in the back shooting video on some of these tours as well as for other aspects of your life. And then, you can sell some advertising that would go between segments, put the video up somewhere and voila, you’re on TV (or on video, anyway) and even making some money. If nothing else, you could make up some t-shirts, etc. with a Luke Ford show logo and some other merch and advertise that–there’s a place on Venice nearby that does T-shirts pretty well from what I understand–and your books and that might be enough for the beginning.
P.P.P.S. Now it’s time for you to outdo yourself…with LUKEAPALOOZA!
Seriously, you up for it?
I mean just think–you could take people to where…what’s-his-name (Rob Spallone?) beat you up and perhaps get someone to be there to re-enact it with you–heck, if it is Spallone, get him to reenact it with you–you’re friends now, right? And then you’d come back to the van with some fake blood on your head, fake black-eye, etc….as you make some money with this thing, you can get more elaborate with this kind of thing.
Again, you are your own reality show.
Another twist–LukeAPalooza A La Gonzo: you drive around with a camera guy and pick up random people to go on your tour–"Hi, I’m Luke Ford, blah blah blah, here I am on the cover of LA Weekly, on video, blah blah blah and I’m giving away free tours of Luke Ford’s LA today to lucky people like you–and you’ll be on my TV show–wanna come?" Maybe get at least one middle aged couple whom you know to be in the van to vouch for you, so they’ll know you’re not really a serial killer. Get the waivers signed, roll camera and action!
The Will To Blog
Emily Gould writes for the New York Times Sunday magazine:
In the fall of 2006, I got a call from the managing editor of Gawker Media, a network of highly trafficked blogs, asking me to come by the office inSoHo to talk about a job. Though Gawker was a must-read for many of the people working at the magazines and newspapers whose editorial decisions the site mocked and dissected, it held an irresistible appeal for desk-bound drones in all fields — tens of thousands of whom visited the site each day.
Sometimes Gawker felt like a source of essential, exclusive information, tailored to the needs of people just like me. Other times, reading Gawker left me feeling hollow and moody, as if I’d just absentmindedly polished off an entire bag of sickly sweet candy. No one was loved. At my old job, it would have taken me years to advance to a place where I would no longer have to humor the whims of important people who I thought were idiots or relics or phonies. I felt liberated — finally, a job where I could really be myself! After college, she worked as an assistant inL.A.
I relayed some of the choicest bits to Henry, who also thought I shouldn’t be reading the comments. The commenters at Emily Magazine had been like friends. Now, with Gawker’s readers, I was having a different kind of relationship. When Jessica cautioned me against reading the comments, she also told me that the commenters loved it when she revealed personal details.
“Emily, don’t quit Gawker!” a young guy shouted at me from his bicycle as I walked down the street one day.
We each wrote our allotment of Gawker posts in the mornings, and in the afternoons we went to the beach. The next few weeks eliminated every constant from my life except my job. Now I felt totally comfortable posting a picture of myself in a bathing suit on the site, inspiring Josh to do the same. I felt blazingly, insanely energized, and the posts came more easily than they ever had before.
After the first night Josh and I spent together, I woke up as the sun rose and sat down at my desk to write a post that was nominally about a recent New York Times article about the shelf-life of romantic love. I shudder involuntarily when I read this post now. The commenters loved it.
Gawker had recently added a counter beside each post that displayed how many views it received. Now it was easy to see exactly how many people cared about my feelings. Readers e-mailed me their own breakup horror stories and posted hundreds of comments, advising me about flavors of ice cream to eat, and I reveled in the attention. I had managed to turn my job into a group therapy session.
We named it Heartbreak Soup. Josh was one of the first people I told about the blog. Then I opened another tab in my browser and logged into Gawker to start compiling the morning’s gossip. I was essentially talking to myself.
I lulled myself into imagining that these Heartbreak Soup readers, like those old Emily Magazine readers, might not even know what Gawker was, that they were reading just because they liked my stories.
One night, after writing a post about my first summer inNew York
At home, I wrote about what had just happened on Heartbreak Soup, and then I password-protected the post, feeling strange and sad.
Losing the Will to Blog
In October,New York
I wasn’t reading The Sunday Times orNew York
If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. “I’m taking it down,” Ruth called to me from the living room, where my laptop sat on a table, displaying our no-longer-so-secret blog.
If the article had been published when I was still working at Gawker, I would have been able to steer the conversation that it provoked.
Late one night, I unlocked Heartbreak Soup and wrote one last post there. In it, I talked about how a single blog post can capture a moment of extreme feeling, but that reading an accumulated series of posts will sometimes reveal another, more complete story. I talked about how taking the once-public blog and making it private, though tempting, felt like trying to revise history.