This web site is dedicated to our friend Gary Brickman, who passed away on June 26, 2000. Hangin' out with Gary / page 1 Matt Jalbert, 14 July 2000 It occurs to me, the builder of this humble web site, that, were a Martian to fire up her iMac and connect to the InterGalactic Wide Web, she might think that Gary Brickman was some kind of big industry dude, wheeling around and cutting deals, making the Web SMIL, and generally being a nice guy. Of course, this is true, but I should hope that if said Martian were to read through the many musings here, she might also find that Gary touched us in deeply personal ways. I would want that Martian to know about the Gary outside of the office and the professional arena: the Gary that talked me through plenty of heartaches, dazzled me with his wit, shared many a meal out, and passed the pipe. To that end, I present some selected memories. Champion of the little guy I was very wet behind the ears when it came to the Internet in early 1996. I had my own web site, Exuberance, a pure vanity play, since late 1994. Pictures of the desert, abandoned cars, rants against temp jobs and the like. I was working as a designer at NetGuide Live, a big web site being hacked together by CMP Media in San Francisco. One day in March 1996 I got an email from Gary Brickman, of whom I had never heard. He wrote that I should check out the New York Times web site the next day and I would happily surprised. Sure enough, the next day I looked and there was this column by Gary Brickman called Hyperwocky, in which he said some damn good things about my web site. Well, that was cool, I thought: getting mentioned in the New York Times. This Brickman character, he’s quite the champion of the little guy! A day later he gave me a call and within a few minutes he was asking me if I wanted to work for him. I told him I was already working and wasn’t going to quit. But then we figured out that we both worked for the same place, CMP Media, though in two different offices: me in San Francisco, he in San Mateo. I agreed to meet him down in San Mateo for an interview anyway (the ever-persuasive Brickman, as I would come to know him), and did so a few days later. Like anyone who first meets Gary on the phone, I was shocked to find, in person, a little guy in a wheelchair. It was pretty apparent that the chair and his condition was essentially “invisible” to him, though, so it was equally invisible to me. We went down to a Good Earth restaurant and by the end of the lunch we were both panning Silicon Valley for its plastic monoculture compared to San Francisco. The deal we closed with was that I wouldn’t take a full-time job with him, but I would take on his web site design project, for the ground-breaking Interactive Age Digital, as a freelance job. I’m handed off to Rich Karpinsky and a few weeks later Gary gets a new web site for the princely sum of $1597.50. (Sorry, I don’t charge those bargain rates anymore.) Brickman gets up to The City Like any self-respecting dot-commer, Gary was chomping at the bit to work in The City rather than down the Peninsula. He finally got transferred up to CMP’s China Basin offices where he took over a big office that had this huge desk. Soon he was working on the TechWeb scene as that project expanded and sucked in more and more people (including me, in spring 1997). Then we were working directly together on a bunch of different projects for TechWeb. That’s where Gary put together his streaming media projects, including Week In Review, for which I did promotional art bits. The whole scene at TechWeb was a blast. Gary, Marci Glazer, Jon Swartz and I occasionally formed a lunch clique, often taking lunch together around the neighborhood at Primo Patio Cafe, the Bay View Grill, Kubala’s Kitchen, South Park Café—ay, the moules and frittes! Countless times I hefted Gary in his chair up the steps at Primo Patio, through its crowded tables to find a spot for him at our table. He was always getting the jalapeño poppers, which disgusted me to no end. It was when Gary was at TechWeb that we really started to bond. I used to go into his office all the time just to shoot the shit. He had all these little promotional knickknacks which I’d fiddle with while kicking my feet up on his table. We’d talk about everything, from office gossip to what the hell was going on with our lives to the ballpark being built right outside his office to movies to… anything at all. If I wasn’t kicking it in Gary’s office, he’d roll around to my corner cubicle and we’d just hang out and talk about some project or another. He was kinda pesky a lot of times and in the tension of the office I sometimes felt like smacking him, but I know he felt like smacking me too! No matter how hotheaded we got about work priorities, though, we’d always end up totally forgetting about it in a few minutes and being back to our regular buddy selves. CONTINUED: Life in San Francisco includes eating out more often Gary Brickman, 1997 »home