There’s nothing like travel to take your head out of everyday life and get you thinking about things. Amy and I headed east last weekend for some much-needed R&R in Vermont, and through some coincidence of the normal seasons and global warming, we were treated to a perfect combination of fall leaves and late-summer weather.

More ridiculously idyllic pix will eventually get posted to Flickr, but a few highlights include:

• walking and driving the back roads around Brattleboro and towns around it like Newfane, Grafton, and Jamaica, watching leaves drift off the trees and flutter
• visiting a graveyard with a stone turnstyle
• stopping at an apple farm that grows ~70 varieties of heirloom apples on the premises — some of the best damned apples you’ve ever tasted
• local cheddar cheese and beer — ditto, and ditto

Best of all, we spent much of the time hanging out with friends Tom and Cathy and their two children, who live on 18 acres with a beaver pond, can’t hear traffic from their yard, and have a box of African percussion instruments and a tree-house with a pirate flag instead of a TV.

Tom (a journalist) and I were also trading book recommendations, and I walked away with his copy of Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben — which I devoured on the plane ride home and can’t recommend highly enough. It’s about the notion that our dependence on energy subsidizes a more hidden dependency on cheap shipping and mass production, and what that does to our food chain and our communities. Because it’s cheaper to produce lettuce AND ship it a thousand miles than it is to produce it on a local farm (at least until the price of oil doubles), the price at the cash register tips the balance in favor of WalMart and WalMart-like superindustries in our food chain. And much is lost in the process — including, in many places, any semblance of an ability to be self-sustaining.

Seriously, if you care about community, local economies, or what you eat, read this book. I’m not saying I agree with everything in it (and particularly I don’t think he’s found the right proscriptive angles yet), but it certainly makes a provocative book-end next to, say, Thomas Friedman.

As I was processing all this, replaying the tape of seeing Dr. Yunus’s talk last week, and after I came home to read about having passed “peak water” in the west, I came to a decision that some things must change for me. Among other things, I’m going to be thinking a lot more about how to get serious about harnessing the web (and Yahoo!) for social purposes.

This was written mostly on the plane back from Mexico City, during which I was reading The World is Flat and using it as a lens to reflect on all I had just experienced, but I wanted to wait until I got at least some of my Flickr pix up before posting.

On the one hand, this city has neighborhoods like Condesa, which is as close to Paris as I’ve experienced in norteamerica, with an urban fabric and economic texture that keeps neighborhoods teeming with the kinds of activities that would have made Jane Jacobs proud – cafes of all national flavors, streetcorner taco stands, shoeshine men, political grafitti, hole-in-the-wall farmacias¸ cab drivers who remember where your house is . . . and more recent additions like tapas bars, hipster hotels, and slick yoga joints. While wandering around, it was hard not to joke that it was the Silverlake of the DF – and even to make specific correlations between establishments in both bohemian outposts. But after consideration I think it compares pretty favorably. Beyond that particular colonia (district), Mexico City is enriched with grand colonial cathedrals and civic architecture, great public parks, dozens of museums featuring international class art, architecture, and archeology, a rich, poly-colonial history, fantastic street life, Aztec architecture, and phenomenal food.

On the other hand, the same shoeshine men have chairs sponsored by Fortune 1000 multinational companies, people buy their sushi at the Superama, and the whole neighborhood is ringed by more nakedly commercial streets with big-box retailers where actual middle-class residents of the city presumably buy their unmentionables. While we didn’t look closely at home prices and rents, it is clear they are going up (a subsequent peek at Craigslist Mexico City confirms this), and the inevitable gentrification is not just making life pleasant for the flaneur, but also showing the back of its hand to longtime residents and via omnipresent rehab sites, swarming laborers, and new construction signs featuring words like “LOFT” – just as it has in Silverlake, Park Slope, Williamsburg, Capital Hill DC, and so many other neighborhoods around the U.S.

It’s the “swarming laborer” part that is one of the most intriguing – and concerning – aspects of the city. Everywhere we went there were domestic workers, and based on the hourly wages implied by the cost of street services from taxis and tacos, there is clearly no shortage of available employees for any given would-be jefe. This makes life great for the tourist – even those who pay the substantial markups these services go for when procured by the international hotels (something we mostly managed to avoid). As when I went to Africa, there seems to be significant human capital here, in a well-enough organized economy, with plenty of opportunity to add to local services or bring new ideas into play. The entrepreneur in me thinks this would be a great place to start a business. . . . many businesses.

But I can’t help thinking Mexico City is an also unwittingly soft target for modern business practices and international ideas. Primitive mural advertising will inevitably give way to conglomerate controlled outdoor media, and the local authorities will fall into line to police this. At some point, it will become intolerable to find prescription medications in suspicious packaging for half off at the corner store. As international entrepreneurs arrive, the shoeshine men will soon follow this Giuliani effect. The big boxes will be the only place “real” people can afford to shop. Eventually, only the rich will be able to afford the good neighborhoods, and – just as in Paris – the middle-class will follow the working-class and the shiftless to the perimeters. Also as for Paris, this will work wonders to attract tourism, given a sub-four-hour flight from LA and a Euro that’s crushing the dollar. (The reason for my trip was a wedding between a New York-based part hindu, part west Indian, Spanish-speaking investment banker and his native wife, and was attended by a veritable united nations of international guests.)

If the bureaucrats typical of state tourism industries realize their dreams, this will become a self-perpetuating cycle. Bringing the cost of real estate up to the point that only the Starbucks’ and McDonalds’ of the world (who are already arriving) can buy their way in.

OK, so this prognostication is undoubtedly an oversimplification. This is, after all, a city whose municipal plumbing leaks 37% of the water that passes through it even as it depletes the aquifer that supports it. It’s hard to imagine any single, monolithic effects from progress (other than the city exceeding its own ability to supply its citizens with essential resources and process its pollution and trash, much as its ancient forbears did). A venture outside the elite neighborhoods brings the unavoidable sight of windowless cinder-block shanties topped by standard-issue PVC water tanks and unfinished rebar sprawling toward the horizons.

(I have to interrupt this parenthetically to note that, as I wrote this, the post-roll from the in-flight screening of Shrek II is currently alternating between images of the ruins & pyramids of Techuatenoc, India’s Taj Mahal, and a man so jowly and well-groomed, I could only assume he was a minister of tourism – a thought seconds later confirmed by a graphic.)

My point, to wrap it up, is that the human capital in Mexico City, fertile though it may be, is no match for China or India, who are turning out hundreds of thousands of engineers a year and steadily building on their various technology platforms, as well as the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to support them. Forget about orchestrated modern education; this beautiful city can barely keep its lights on. And in this, it strikes me as similar to many countries around the world that will either have to learn to compete with modern economies, become tourism meccas, continue to mine their natural resources until they are depleted, or find some other means to thrive (art?). I suspect Mexico will fall back mainly to tourism — ironically enough banking on the U.S.’s failure to preserve its own wildlands and urban fabric.

I have high hopes for Mexico City and hope that many great chefs and service entrepreneurs will cut their teeth here and make things great for residents, visitors, and expats alike. I know Amy and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, if unexpectedly, and certainly plan to return. It is hard to imagine, though, in the long run, that these things will outweigh the forces of globalization enough to last very long.

I’ve been brewing on a couple of threads over the past few days that I think come together in a complicated but interesting point. We’ll see.

First, I flew over the entire Baja peninsula on the way here. It is almost entirely devoid of anything other than desert life exept at a few very small points. On farms and construction sites, they drive water around in tank trucks, with the water splashing out of the valves. As I sit in a vertiable water-works of a resort without any clue how they get water down here, I am thinking this is not environmentally sustainable.

Second, I see a lot of Volkswagen Beetles on the road, still. As the owner of a ‘71 Ghia built on the Beetle platform (aka VW Type I), I came to the realization that VW Beetles are one of history’s finest examples of an open-source platform. Viz:

• a large number of cars in many varieties built on a common, simple platform
• wide availability of parts (original, refurbished, reproduction) without any that are “proprietary” to VW – you could literally build one from scratch using after-market parts and VW wouldn’t come after you
• a large number of mechanics who know how to work on VW’s
• a robust after-market modifications and add-ons trade (think Baja dune buggies, etc.)
• truly anyone can hack on one without specialized training – if you can build Ikea furniture, you can probably adjust the valves and carb on a VW

Third, I’m here with a bunch of fraternity brothers, a significant number of whom are investment bankers, analysts, or techies. It’s led to some interesting discussion points – among many others, that poverty in China is appalling beyond description; that “small hedge funds aren’t interesting anymore – the consolidation has already begun”; that autism rates are climbing dramatically, and well-educated and affluent people in the U.S. are afraid to trust the food they eat; that “it’s surprising and a little sad that none of us are doing much of anything creative.” (I like to think I’m doing something creative, but the point is well taken given the breadth and artistic creativity of the people we were in college.)

Fourth, I started reading Paul Graham’s (so-far excellent) Hackers & Painters, thinking about value creation and software.

What I’m building up to is a point that the problems of the world are becoming more and more severe, more inter-related across local geographies, increasingly cumulative, and more and more addressable only at an institutional level. The size that institutions need to be to be players is growing – and I personally believe that government is broken.

Small players and startups can take whacks at global-scale problems, and can certainly create value in doing so. But there is so much more leverage if they can slingshot their distribution off a platform. And certain kinds of problems are going to really benefit from the kinds of contributions only an open-source movement can make.

Specifically, I would love to see another generation of open-source vehicles, this time around with an environmentally friendly bent. There would be plenty of motive for this to come from a single source – after all, the VW Beetle was the longest and most produced single-design vehicle in history. But it seems to me the Who Killed the Electric Car? problem largely goes away in an open-source context. People who hack Priuses are on the right track, but we need something more accessible to laypeople, and more modular.

I would also love to see open-source variations on Kiva and KickStart – perhaps with a Cambrian House approach to development and distribution. If you can invent a better human-powered irrigation pump that can increase productivity in developing world rural farming, distribution should not be a barrier.

Finally, we all need to be thinking about the power of the institutions we work for, and how they can be better harnessed – or at leasted “opened” – to potentially powerful, world-changing uses. Because as a society, we’re not going to be able to fly to remote desert destinations and splash around in abundant water forever.

On the travel and music front, 2007 kicked off with a terrific trip to Aspen.

Amy and I had hopped the incredibly convenient LAX-ASE route, which at a mind-bending 1 hour and 37 minutes makes Aspen closer than most of the driveable weekend destinations around LA — and at $225 round-trip is almost compulsory. We had blue-ribbon days on the mountain, with great snow, sunshine, some terrific meals, and no serious injuries despite our decision to play with snowboards.

I even got to see Austin stalwart Junior Brown, whom I’d never heard, but who is terrific and apparently well known not only to Austinites, but also to fans of Spongebob Squarepants and the movie version of the Dukes of Hazzard (in which he stands in the mighty big shoes of Waylon Jennings as narrator).

His musical style and stage presence are hard to describe and need to be experienced properly to be fully understood, but here’s his myspace (!!!), on which you can listen to a few choice samples featuring lines like “Cause you’re wanted by the police, and my wife thinks you’re dead”, along with a flickr photo set that captures some of the visual flavor.

There’s still plenty of time to see him on his 2007 tour, so do it!

How I didn’t know this by intuition and sense of smell the day it opened is beyond me, but even though they have a still-under-construction website, Pizzeria Mozza is most definitely open for business. Amy & I went last night and were enthusing from the second we walked into the door through the rest of the meal.

Amazingly, the tables were all booked at 5pm, but we were able to get a prime seat at the pizza bar without difficulty – and were treated to a ringside view of Nancy Silverton presiding over a very impressive wood-fired brick oven and pizza station, watching her pull gurgling, smoking pizzas out one after another, only to layer on beautiful ingredients like prosciutto, burrata, fennel, high-end pepperoni & sausage, and grated pecorino, all the while managing her team with the kind of demanding perfectionism you don’t see often enough in LA. The front-of-house service was just as on point and the main attraction, the pizza itself, was gorgeous: a perfectly crisp bottom crust, with edges carbonized on the outside and yeasty on the inside, and just the right amount of savoryness. I won’t even bother to tell you what we had; since we were basically in the kitchen, I can promise you it’s all that good. I can’t believe I’m saying things this superlative about a pizza outside of NYC, but perhaps we’ve debunked a myth as well: it’s obviouly not the water.

We’ll certainly be going back to eat our way around that menu and drink around the selective wine list. As Amy put it, “We finally found a craveable restaurant!”

This morning we were inspired after repeated urges from a friend, to check out a spot called Square One, an unpretentious cafe on an unpretentious street tucked between the Scientology Center and the hospital, between Los Feliz and Koreatown. We were moved to ask again, how did we not know about this sooner? Given that this one’s been open the better part of a year, shame on us! As at Mozza, every option on the menu looked as good as the next, from the fresh-ingredient benedicts (as reviewed by EatingLA here) to the baked-egg skillets to the ox-tail and shortrip hashes. We had an artisanal bacon-and-egg sandwich on beautifully flaky and buttery homemade brioche bread, along with a really interesting lemon-thyme chicken sausage and roast tomato omelet. Even the coffee was perfect: a strong brew of a mildly nutty varietal from (I think) somewhere in Central America.

Once again Amy nailed it by saying “All weekends should be like this!”