65 Roses

Thanks to our West Coast correspondent John Fox for filling me in on the upcoming Pressure Boys reunion at the Cradle to raise money for research for a cure to Cystic Fibrosis.

YouTube doesn't offer any video for the gang, so lets just capture the spirit of the era with a scene from the classic Holy Grail, known throughout as the scene of French Taunting.



I actually picked up a copy of the Grail from the local thrift store (along with my new Rockfordesque sports coat), and Mary and I watched an hour and found that it has held up down through the years, much more so than did its spawn, The Life of Brian.

The dipping point

The Times coverage of Heath Ledger's death brought to mind earlier instances of young idols killing themselves, begetting imitators, and being considered bellwethers (frankly, I hadn't thought of Ledger as a big deal, cute though he may have been). The writer pulls up Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther as a reference point where lots of young people had gone out and killed themselves after the book came out.

Back to Malcolm Gladwell and The Tipping Point, where the author drones on and on about suicide epidemics in Micronesia. Why didn't Gladwell have anything to say about the Werther suicides or other similar incidents (including the "Eseninschina" outbreak in Russia after Sergei Esenin killed himself in 1925, and which led Mayakovsky* to write a poem to pull young folks back from the brink of death[and before he capped himself on April 14, 1930] )? He should have at least remembered Werther. My point is, Gladwell's seeming polymathism is a little shallow. He shoulda had some of them New Yorker fact-checkers and fact-suggesters working with him.



*By the way, since Mayakovsky rears his head here again, lets return for a moment to the provenance of this blog, a short poem from 1913:

Eat your pineapples,
Chew your grouse,
Your days days are coming,
You bourgeois louse

I think that about says it all.

Ideology of Valentines Day

Natalie got a note from school mandating that everybody make Valentines for everybody else, which stated: "Valentine cards do not have to be purchased; in fact, homemade cards seems to mean more to the children. They very much enjoy making and giving things to their friends." If they enjoy so much, you'd think there'd be no need to put forth a rule that they do so.

I kind of bridle at this dictum. Is it the role of the school to transmit this kind of ideology? I dunno. Some think the school system should be a prime purveyor of "values," and to a certain extent it should. But this low level anti-commercialist, craftsy stuff, however much I may agree with it, doesn't seem what schools should be concentrating on.

It reminds me of the recent PBS special after the death of Charles Schultz. When the Charlie Brown Xmas special first aired, it was a tremendous success, a TV history watershed, as it launched a broadside at the commercialization of Xmas and the holiday's loss of authenticity. And it remains a perennial favorite, my kids love it, I love it, the music is deeply ingrained in the Yuletide canon, but the urge to spend and adorn at Christmas remains as strong as ever. Retail numbers in December drive the markets, the Street, the macroeconomic outlook in general. How can earnest anti-commercialism and the Gods of the Mall live in such peace and harmony?

I am reminded of what Baudrillard said of Watergate:

Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists). Same operation, though this time tending towards scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress.

That is, the annual genuflection before Schulz's critique of consumption sets us free to load up as we see fit.

My many accessories

I now have gloves, scarf, Blackberry, cell phone, car keys. It had been some time since I had lost anything more serious than a pair of cheap sunglasses.

But today, as I sat down on the train, most distressingly found that I had lost my swanky glasses, which I had picked out exactly one year ago tomorrow. Not cheap, either. And the last time I saw them, on the subway, I remember being so proud of myself for remembering to take them off with two hands, so as not the bend them.

Fat lot of good that did me. All thanks and praise to jah for my new vision insurance.

Bitch in black

This morning as I came down Broadway past Ground Zero and in front of Chase and Brown Brothers Harriman, I spotted a woman all in black. Rail thin, on stilletto heels obscured by mock bell bottoms or whatever you call them, she can't have weighed more than 100 lbs, including her carefully and (I'm sure, in some circles) stylishly touseled hair, but she walked with a firm sense of purpose. Stylish sunglasses protected her against nothing. Shiny black I'm sure expensive bag. She was accessorized to the max, driving hard towards her goal, whatever it was. I was glad I wasn't between her and it, between her and anything, really.

She was a vision from something.

MLKJ Day, Exxon station, Hamilton, NJ

With Tuesday teed up to be the worst day in the markets since 9/11, with the whole world spooked, I had on this Martin Luther King Jr Day one of those experiences which gives one faith in America, or, rather the pluralistic America we were brought up to believe in.

After dropping off a bunch of kids' stuff at a thrift store in Hamilton, NJ where I was attended to by a Mexican guy in a slick black leather jacket and bright white cotton gloves (shades of Thriller-era Michael Jackson), I went to fill up the car at an Exxon station. While there, it occurred to me that they might have shaving cream in the convenience store there, which would save me a stop and really justify the convenience part of the name. So I go in there and look around but I'm not seeing it and the the guy behind the register calls out to me: "What's going on there?" And then he points me to the shaving cream, up near the register (probably because the blades next to it are the most expensive thing in the store, display inch for display inch).

As I was completing my purchase, I hear the door behind me open the guy at the register looks up and cries out – “JD!” sounding for all the world like a frat boy pretending to be a rapper. JD swaggers back behind the counter and the two share a chest bump hug, and then start talking to each other happily in Urdu or Tamil or Farsi or whatever they spoke, probably not Hindi because as I looked up to my left I noticed a picture of the store’s proprietor lounging in something fez-like and a vest more Islamic than not, next to a picture of a mosque.

Once back outside, I saw that my car had pumped full but the hose was still in my tank and my credit card was just sitting there in the slot. Another attendant walked over from the other set of pumps and then, when he saw me getting back into my car with my transaction still dangling, he RAN over, got the receipt, put the hose away, and dashed round to give me my card.

And so, after the MLKJ day, I think that I saw something of King’s legacy was reflected at that convenience store. An strong and vibrant immigrant community half a world away from its home. A mercantile ethos that values the account of some strange, beat-up car enough to hustle to keep it.

Heading into a day of great uncertainty on Wall St, this was instructive. 75 bps may have staved off disaster for now but who knows for how long. After a period when America was effectively the developing world’s preferred place to outsource investment acumen (via dollar pegs and sovereign investments in our govt debt), we don’t look like the savviest investors now. America is going to need to figure out what of value it has to offer to the world. They’re not going to come buy Detroit’s crappy cars, the new Malibu or no. Hollywood can only make so many movies. The one thing of lasting value we have is a friendly climate for newcomers, which fosters IP. So long as we remember to have it.

Odd quiet

Wall Street is oddly quiet today. People going about their work, one restaurant entirely empty, young bucks walking on the street smoking without coats. Do I detect an undertone of guilt, or am I just projecting?

Stopped by a British journallist in front of the exchange, I issue an opinion but insist on anonymity. Not all that bad anyway.

Return to Return to the Trial, or Western Union still sucks

A few weeks back I reported on my generally crappy experience with Western Union. At that time I had, for the second time, requested a receipt for a phone transaction, whether a snail- or e-mail version, I really don't care, but it's needed for tax reporting. 3 weeks and change later, I still don't have squat. Because people like to Google this string, I'll say it again: Western Union sucks.

Triumph!

Last night I cut Graham's hair, for the first time in perhaps seven-eight months. Since he trimmed his own bangs a few months ago, he had come to look much like a mini-me of Ewan McGregor from Velvet Goldmine. Minus the spangles, usually. There has been much speculation that his haircut aversion is evidence of Sensory Integration Disorder, and while this thesis has by no means been disproved, his hair is, at least, much shorter and more manageable. I'll try to do some follow-up trimmage in upcoming days.

Waste of a holiday

Martin Luther King Jr Day is such a waste. Not, mind you, that I don't support commemorating the life of King. In that sense it's as worthy a holiday as we have, well more so than say, Presidents' Day, Columbus Day, Labor Day, etc.

No no, it's just that we don't need a holiday in January, we just had a bunch. What would be good is a holiday in March or April. Problem is, all of the commemorable events in King's life cluster near other holidays. The "I have a Dream Speech" was right near Labor Day. On the other hand, the "Bloody Sunday" of the march on Selma was March 25, and he was assasinated on April 4 (like Lincoln, who got nailed April 14).

So we will just have to live with not working this Monday.

The Tipping Point

I stole a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling extravaganza The Tipping Point off of the shelf in George's room in Larchmont. He's a smart guy and he pulls together lots of disparate material -- some of it interesting -- but it doesn't, at the end of the day, cohere. Here's what he tells us about social "epidemics":

1. They are spearheaded by charismatic, well-connected people ("Salesmen", "Mavens", "Connectors") who know how to boil things down so they make sense to people
2. They are "sticky," well-thought out and placed for their audiences
   
3. Something else, which I should remember because he repeats it and would remember if it made sense and hung together
   

This book has been a huge business best seller, and has presumably been influential. I'll bet you executives the land around discuss what it means to their businesses in frequent flier clubs. But I don't see how telling them to have well-targeted products in the hands of well-connected smooth talker adds a whole lot to the discussion.

Rhythm

To my expansive readership,

I have recently begun commuting to the Big Apple from this little whatever you would call it. Which means I get home late and tired, on top of which I'm not really supposed to post to the blog at work. Which in turn means that it's gonna be hard to establish a rhythm of posting, at least for a few weeks, so I will ask you to bear with me as I work it out, don't foresake the Grouse. I should probably write my blog on the train and post it when I get home, but to do that I need to get a seat for starters (OK that's not usually so hard) and not have some work that I've promised for later that evening or the next morning (harder). Or, alternately, not be too tired (the hardest).

Could be I end up starting to be more of a weekend poster.

Delicious quiche

Mary made a delicious quiche this evening, and then enumerated all the virtues and downsides of its various ingredients. To wit, its high fat content. And the quiche has a cruel transparency about it, you just glance at it and calculate how many of those fat grams have gone down already. But delicious nonetheless.

Vibrations

Ever since I got my Blackberry, which is set on a demure vibrate like its cousin my cell phone, whenever I hear a vibration I think it's someone dinging me with an all-important email. Which is on occasion true, but more often it's the chassis of the train or the heating system of the building or even (blast it!) someone else's Blackberry. It's very wierd to have vibration (along with ringing, screaming, glass breaking, etc.) hauled into the domain of signifying sounds. And not altogether good.

Just when I think....

I've made my way out of the gutter, they reach up and pull me back in.

When I go to Statcounter to view the traffic for this blog, it offers a paid service for me to "Increase your log size!"

None of the industrious comment-adders of this blog can improve much on that one.

My tax dollars, hardly working

Seated comfortably at my desk this morning (something we won't be seeing much of starting soon), I heard a rumbling from the street, and what did I see? One of the Borough dump trucks being trailed by this claw loader (or whatever it's called, Graham and Mary were of no help) which was picking up Christmas trees. Talk about overkill. That's a lot of emissions for a pretty simple job, but hey, if you've got heavy equipment you'd better use it for something. Princeton should sell the loader, rent one when it needs one, and pay some dude from the pueblo 14 bux an hour to walk along and throw the trees in the back of a truck. Ditch half the FTEs.

Hot Fuzz

The trailer for this British satire is not better than OK, so we didn't know what we were in for when we rented it. This is one clever movie. Occasionally it's a little mechanical and it keeps working the same jokes, but still it's fresh, funny, and full of surprises. It won't change your life or anything like that, but it will make you LOL, as they say. Rent it, if you haven't.

Some Ideas

How about open source calendaring? I'm sure it's out there. You could sign up to have events from vendors you select pop up as suggestions on your calendar. You could even have affinity algorithms like they use at Amazon learn about you and suggests events based on prior purchases. Not send things to your inbox, but pencil it on your calendar as a possibility. Click thru to order tickets, select seats, etc.

How bout this: on top of the play areas they currently have for small children, grocery stores should add reading rooms for older kids with comfy chairs where they can take their books.

This last thing is the kind of amenity we're unlikely to see in the recession which is either underway or imminent, though there will be plenty of fallow real estate available for this or other uses.

Which actually leads me to another thought: it's time to start dreaming out what new's gonna come out of this recession. The tech bubble, for example, left a huge overhang of excess telecoms capacity, has that been worked off? Nobody writes about it anymore. And the recession itself begat not only cheap money and the housing bubble but also a really vibrant web with real business models and 2.0 too.

If we don't want to put our hispanic workforce in all the excess housing that nobody wants to pay for, why don't we repurpose much of it from residential to retail so that there will be a store in every neighborhood and people won't have to drive so far to get milk? And we could also use some of those houses to grow high end killer pot, which we could then export to offset the current account deficit. Don't let nobody tell you there are no options.

Taking out the tree, and more

Natalie was pretty wistful about our taking down the tree last night. She was close to tears, but I consoled her by telling her that it was supposed to snow 3-5 inches overnight (Then, of course, it didn't, despite 90% probability on the treacherous weather.com)

Who would ever suspect that this sweet, sensitive child would have been found pummelling her little baby brother in the back while he wailed away that same afternoon? I had left them out of my sight for like 45 seconds while looking for play date material for her, and there she was just banging on his back.

Sibling stuff is not simple.

Low-impact transparency

Steve was just over and talking about a lecture on grass he recently went to, about how the guy was saying that grass was so perfect for competition and neighborhood peer pressure because it's so visible.

One's carbon footprint, on the other hand, is anything but visible. Yes, the size of your car is visible, but how much do your drive it? The size of your house is visible, but how well is it insulated? How much do you heat it? How much of it do you heat? Etc.

If greater transparancy could be had around footprints, people's behavior could change. What if everyone in a town (or a select plurality) registered odometer readings on Jan 1 and then on 12/31? Give out prices to the house with the lowest mileage, the block with the lowest mileage (to enclose carpooling). Get people into it year 1, then in year 2 expand the competition to include more metrics (kilowatt hrs, therms). Have towns compete with each other for per capita footprint, etc.

The main idea is to get people into really monitoring themselves and to make it fun. But also to be transparent about it. There's a lot of peer pressure around dandelions and other weeds in the suburbs, neighbors may hiss at you behind your back if you're suspected of infecting their lawn. Lets put some more of that superego nastiness into the discourse of global warming.

Meat arbitrage -- a behavioral analysis

When putting together breakfast sandwiches, Manhattan's sandwich smiths display curiously anomalous behavior. They put one sausage patty on there with your eggs (there are those who also order cheese), but ca 3 pieces of bacon. Now, as anyone who has ordered in a suburban restaurant can tell you, there is rough parity between sausage patties and slices of bacon, sometimes 2 sausage patties is sold for the cost of 3 slices of bacon, sometimes you go 3 for 3.

In Manhattan, however, the fact that sausage patties are a little bigger than bacon slices confuses the handlers, who do not have a well-formed concept of intrinsic meat unit parity.

This, of course, suggests a possible play, wherein multiple slices of (underpriced) bacon might be sourced in the city and transported to the suburbs, for some mad profits. Just don't tell anybody, or this window of arb opportunity will slam mercilessly shut.

Verka Serduchka

From Kevin. An interesting video. Doesn't go where you think it's going. This guy is apparently something of a Ukrainian Borat. I will watch more.

From the website of Andrey Danilko, "What is the secret of such popularity of Verka Serduchka? Maybe it is in the fact that she is able to amuse people and grant them only positive emotions." Yeah, except not.

Tough love

The Times this morning reported that Wall Street wants Bernanke to be "tougher," to deliver more hard news about the economy to the public. And how should he show this toughness? By lowering interest rates, of course. Free money is a tough nut to swallow.

Now, I'm no economist, so I don't know how M1, M2, M3 and all that interrelate, but I seem to recall that the ultra-accomodative monetary policy of the post 9/11 Greenspan-led Fed is said to have played a large part in pumping up the current bubble. Isn't the dollar to weak for us to be printing money? Wouldn't we be passing the credit risk back to the Treasury, further weakening the dollar's status as preferred reserve currency, driving foreign Treasuries out of T-bills and thereby pushing rates right back up?

And how, in the face of all this, are we going to allocate the 1-2% of GDP that experts say is necessary for America to attack climate change amelioriation in an effective way? We're not, of course, the short term demands of keeping the malls running will take precedence.

What America needs now is to take its medicine. Less consumption, less expansion, more concerted effort at the big CYA.

Modesto Proposal

The powers that be have been bandying about a number of ideas for the dealing with the mortgage part of the credit crunch. Proposals have been floated to let ARMs run for a full 30 years at their teaser rate. This is mildly vexing for those of us who calculated how much house we could buy and how much risk we could assume in purchasing our homes, and therefore opted for the "safe" 30-year fixed route. One way or another, we will share the bill for this excess with those who failed to exercise restraint.

But there's a great way we could address this. Why not structure a deal to let all of those who borrowed and/or bought more than they could afford use their excess space (defined as the space they borrowed for but couldn't afford) more effectively? Let those with mortgages to be modified house the homeless, the Katrina victims, the Hispanic and other legal and illegal immigrants currently jammed quietly into small living spaces for the privilege of making our super size me services sector affordable through grey economy labor? What else are the McMansions (and other more modest stretches) of recent vintage for if not for housing people?

(La gente, unida, nunca sera vencida)

Wanderlust and wonder lost

I don't know where I heard of Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, the New Yorker or the New York Time or somesuch, at any rate I'm sure it had New York in the title. In it, the author recounts his 1933 journey on foot (with help from boats) from jolly old England where he had been booted from school across good old Mitteleuropa. The review must have pretty well glowed, cuz I put it on my wishlist and was psyched to get it. The book's introduction is written by a big fan, who coos about Leigh Fermor's well-etched style. Indeed.

The book suffers from a surfeit of style. Much as I wanted to love this freebootin young rapscallion, I found myself deeply frustrated by his need to continually play tricks with point of view (I was drunk so it's all in an art-schoool haze) and to lard on the writerly, without really telling us much (the people were so simple, so pure, so nice. I was cold so the food and beds were welcome).

It all seemed deucedly familiar. Where had I seen this before? A Brit going on foot through snow and recounting adventures? Why, how about Rory Stewart's recently lauded The Places in Between, about trekking across Afghanistan. Also self-absorbed and dead boring. Read 70 pages maybe before setting it out to gather dust.

I think, maybe, the moral for me is that sending some introspective young UKer off on a journey on foot into snow and dirt is probably not going to make for a good read, however much fun it sounds like.

Yahoos on the sidelines

Every time I make her watch any sporting event Mary goes off about how sports are ridiculous, in particular the face painted drunk screaming yahoos. I have often argued that sports give those people, and those of us who sometimes act like them, a place to vent and keeps them off the streets so that the rest of us can do business safely.

And then this morning the NY Times we see economists have done research indicating that violence in movies can be correlated, in the short term at least, with a decrease in violent crime. I.e. violent movies give those inclined to violence (teen and 20s guys) something to do rather than go out and bash heads. Critics are already railing that this analysis doesn't account for long-term adverse effects of, say, depictions of decapitations and gang-bangs and whatnot, and that's a valid thought.

But fundamentally, I buy it, and I think the same principal is at work in sport. As back in the Roman day with the Colisseum, keep em off the streets, give em some catharsis -- be it sports or film -- and let em work it out by proxy.

Look at the violence in Kenya now in the run up to the presidential elections, to say nothing of the Hutu-Tutsi days in the Great Lakes area. This violence seems to bespeak an absence of sufficient representational proxy.

90-88

Alright so we pulled it out of a hat against Clemson this evening, which is great and all, and yet...

For proper seasoning, Carolina needs to take a loss or two here in the middle of the season, and this would have been a good one to lose. The ACC only has three ranked teams, which is pretty weak, and Clemson is junior amongst them. And Clemson played its little orange heart out, they really kind of earned the win, they just blew it.

After a period of paranoia, I'll open the floor up for comment again.

Epic man on a string

Listening to Friends of Old time Music, a landmark Smithsonian collection from the early 60s. ON Disc 2 Doc Watson sings the "Hicks' Farewell", in which a guy about to die or somesuch writes home to his kin. In the song, a Watson's sings accompanied by a violin, which tracks the melody alongside the lyric and does almost nothing else. This in turn reminded me of a scene from an early Kusturica movie (I think it is Do you remember Dolly Bell) where a father figure sits in a courtyard and plays the gusla and sings a plaint for Bosnia as the protagonist and his older brother wrestle in the stone courtyard and grind each others faces into the stone. I think there's a similar epic tradition in Persian and/or India, an epic tune sung to the tight melodic accompaniment of rudimentary stringed instrument. It'd be interesting to dig into this parallel for real, in my ample spare time.

A Child's Christmas in Wales

Graham just loves this book, speaks to him. First time for me too. It really is a cut above the general lot of Xmas Children's fare, which is itself not too shabby.

The Gusla Player

A video from Moscow noise band Череп скелета (Skeleton Skull).

It's not brilliant, but gives a good idea of why Russians are bored and alienated and what they do about it.

A year in Grousing, redux

First off, I owe an apology to my few faithful readers, whom I left hanging on December 10th with the following tease:

At bedtime, Natalie, having gotten a jumpstart on 2008 with the January issue of Highlights, burst into Graham's room with some fresh comic material:
"What do April showers bring?" (she asks)
"Ummm.., May flowers" (me)
"And what do May flowers bring?"
I should have known this, but didn't. A trick question. The answer will come in tomorrow's edition.

Of course, the answer did not come, but here it is: "May flowers bring pilgrims." That's good stuff.

Nothing else to retract, though at times I think I'd just as soon retract the whole damned year. We're headed off this evening to a Hogmanay bonfire, into which one can write things one would like to forget from the soon to be done year and throw it into the fire. I may use a legal notepad and die of handcramps before I get there.

No but seriously, 2007 has been a year of much opportunity, capped by a number of high points: Graham's improving allergy numbers and one haircut, Natalie's intense reading and twin triumph over biking without training wheels and swimming, Clark's new bike, ultimate game and job, and Mary's general forebearance. Right here on the blog, we've seen growing traffic as we approach the triumphal 1000th post milestone. And, as many of you will attest, there has been an astonishing deepening of wisdom here in Grouseland, complemented by a certain stylistic grace and an overwhelming modesty that leads many educated observers to term this the greatest blog of all time. God, you gotta love that.

So yall come on back in 2008 and set a spell, y'hear?

The Rockford Files, from the beginning

Correction. The episode described below was not Episode 1. The discs are not well marked. I'm still confused about where he got the nice house. Mor on that later.

Some kind soul decided to purchase seasons 1 and 2 of the Rockford Files for me on DVD for Xmas, and last night he and I sat down to watch the initial episode. Jim was there, looking young and svelte and desperately overdressed for the Socal locale. Rocky was there too, with mugs of hot coffee for distraught sonny boy and suggestions of freshwater fishing. Dennis the cop was also on board from episode 1.

Generally speaking, the series starts out pretty melancholy. Jim walk on the beach alone, sighs, pouts. His sweetheart has been took and whacked by "the syndicate" for something she saw.

What I don't get is why Jim has a sweet if basic crib on a seemingly abandoned beach, a $5 mln house in 2007 terms, when later he's got a beat up trailer. He's already driving his Firebird, after all. Time will tell, perhaps. Maybe he's got money to lose at the beginning of the show, as opposed to later.

Return to the Trial, or, why Western Union sucks

For a recent project I had to make use of Western Union to send some money offshore. I had never used Western Union before, and never will again. For a business which is 100% about trust, it is abysmally run and organized. I'd have reps say they were going to call me back to confirm my home number and then not do it. So I assumed transactions weren't cleared, only to find out later that they were (OK, just one, which I pulled back). Fees were non-trivial, ca 8% for phone transactions, 4% for in-person (probably closer to reasonable).

I sent one transaction over the phone and never got a receipt. I called up and the first rep said she couldn't send an email receipt (why not?), that a snail mail one was on the way. OK. But it never got here. A month later I call back and give some slow French-sounding dude the primary key for the transaction and his system won't let him pull up any details on it. So he transfers me to another woman in West Virginia and she can't find the date it happened. Finally she pulls it all together and gets my email address, then has to forward my case to the
"correspondence desk."

One thing Western Union does do is authenticate thoroughly on the phone to guard against identity theft. That's all they do well. Otherwise the place is a mess.

Most of us need not concern ourselves with this. Western Union is a business for the underclass, a way to get money home easily. But what I saw gives a small window into the quality of financial services being offered to the lower-income set: pretty shabby. I suspect there's opportunity for market entry here for better wire-transfer services at lower fees, using an already existing network such as an ATM network.

Evil white boy

Got on the subway this evening at Wall St, wearing a baseball cap from one investment bank, reading a book about another, in a black trench coat and geeky glasses. So I guess I looked a little malevolent to some. I got a seat next to a 3-year black girl who was stretched out and fast asleep with her head in the lap of her mother, who was listening to an Ipod Nano . She was very cute, very sweet, and I looked over at her and thought how my kids could never sleep like that. I go back to reading.

All of a sudden I hear a voice from across the way. I look up and it's coming from an obese black woman with a classic Ipod and a bad attitude: "I see you lookin at her like you got a problem with it, like she oughta get up." Obviously she had no training as a mind reader "Actually, I was thinking that she looked rather sweet and I was reminded of my own kids." She muttered something to herself, trying to claim the high ground, and put her earphones back in. I resisted the temptation to argue with her more or say something denigrating on the way out.

Fucking imbecile.

Some big surprises

Locked out of my office this morning, even the receptionists didn't come in here at the office hotel. Watching SquawkBox over breakfast. Everybody's psyched about the good consumer spending numbers, then somber about predictions that there might be as much as $100 bln in defaults in option ARM mortgages coming up 2008ff.

Hello! WTF do you expect? If consumers are taking their credit cards to the mall, you know darned good and well they're not servicing their all too-complex mortgages. Two years ago they were taking debit cards tied to HELOCs to the mall. Brilliant.

It's been prima facie evident for years that people have been borrowing too much. There are no surprises here. It's just another opportunity for actors with strong balance sheets to swoop in and grab assets. The problem is, the assets suck. Big-assed houses built off in the middle of fucking nowhere that are exactly the wrong thing for a society that needs to move away from driving big SUVs to malls. Unlike the excess of telecom capacity that we worked off from 2003 forward, this time the assets are just wrong, and should be torn down.

Why me?

Cursed fate today when I got on the wrong PATH train from Jersey City today and went to Hoboken instead of Newark. I mean, I really cursed. Had to retrace steps and then back to Newark and thence to Princeton, by then blowing what I had planned for the last bit of afternoon. I was downright Scroogy, almost even humbugged the smiley people with their suitcases ready to fly off to holiday climes. I'm sure the airport would have put me in good cheer.

Licking seasonal envelopes while listening to some yule motets is doing some good. As are the twinkling lights of the tree.

Racing fools

Bloomberg today ran a story about one J. Kyle Bass and his hedge fund Hayman Capital Partners. Bass is one of the truly smart guys who was ahead of the curve in sniffing out danger in the mortgage markets and took short positions in them in time to make lots of money from the current mayhem. The story tells of how -- as he did lots of hardcore due diligence on companies in the mortgage ecosystem -- Bass singled in on one mortgage lender he just knew had to mean trouble, Daniel Sadek of Quick Loan Funding of California. A key red flag for Bass was that Sadek funded a movie about car racing in which Porsches got busted up good.

The car racing connection took me back to the story of Centrix Financial of Denver, a subprime auto lender that took to sponsoring the Denver Grand Prix race before it ran afoul of regulators and subsequently imploded.

So is association with car racing Icarus-like behavior for the alpha set? Well, on the one hand, Paul Newman has yet to be singed by it. Then again, Jason Priestly messed himself up pretty good on a race track and Colin Powell, well, lets just say that his enthusiasm for the fast ones may or may not be correlated with his basically perjuring himself before the UN Security Council in 2003 with testimony that lent his then-considerable credibility to the Iraq escapade, which may prove to be the moment the United States ejected itself from the drivers seat of History.

Los grits

At a breakfast counter this morning at Chambers and Church Sts. this older hispanic construction worker sits down and orders fried eggs and then asks "tienes grits?" (do you have grits). And the counter guys says "no, we've got home fries and french fries, what do you want?" And the
older guy says "no potatoes." So I'm wondering if grits are popular in the Mexican community, with its corn-based diet. In the Northeast you've historically been able to get them only in African-American nabes, but there's a lot of overlap between them and hispanic ones.

Or the guy could have been diabetic, preferring the complex corn to the simple carb potato. He had whole wheat toast and Equal in his coffee. You never know.

Auktsion

This band is like the Sonic Youth of Russia: the elder statesmen of independent rock. Great live.

Glenn Gould at work

When I was still in college my uncle Ballard out of the blue gave me a copy of Glenn Gould's The Goldberg Variations, the 1981 revisitation of the piece that made him a big star back in 1955. I always thought the piece was deeply soulful, and that Bach must have been written on the occasion of the death or illness of some close buddy of his named Goldberg. Imagine my dismay to learn that it was -- according to legend at least -- a piece commissioned to ease the insomnia of some rich nobleman guy, who had a pianist named Goldberg. Go figure. So really it's just a piece of virtuosity.

Still, listening to Gould playing Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier is an altogether different experience. It doesn't even hint at the depth of the later Goldberg recording. Maybe that's just Gould sensing that his own days are numbered, as they indeed were at the time.

Troitus interruptus

In a demonstration of our truly formidable will power, we have just stopped in the middle of the Bourne Ultimatum, Matt Damon having just kicked some asset. This series of films reminds me a lot of Bunuel's The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in that nobody ever gets to eat. Or shower. They're too busy hopping on trains and motorcycles and killing people, the staples of good movies.

In praise of J Mascis

Working on my nasty painting project on the landing upstairs, took advantage of empty house to blast tunes. First Arcade Fire because, after all, it's New Jersey and, as I've said, the guy sounds a lot like Springsteen. But then I grabbed an old Dinosaur Jr. record, Without a Sound, a 1994 release of the "J Mascis Experience" period, after Barlow had left to form Sebadoh and J was playing basically all the instruments himself in the studio. This is not his best record, but still...

J Mascis and Dinosaur Jr mark a singular moment in the development of post-punk tunes, having the courage to step out from the phalanxes of Marshall Stacks and bar chords to sing from the heart and express a vision of self with fretboard and kick pedals. J was perhaps the first lyric punk, if not the last.

Moving along

Fast plowing through my pre-re-employment week of rest, when I've been supposed to be working on a painting project on the 2nd floor landing of the house, pulling off old telephone wires put there by generations of dial-up mad grad students, scraping, sanding, caulking, painting. Sadly, I am stuck at scraping and sanding. I took 45 minutes on Monday and sat in the comfortable chair in the corner of the living room and read. Should do more of that. We'll see.

For this week have resisted the call of Manhattan and the many fine people there, instead am concentrating on doing a "farewell tour" of lunches here in the heart of fair Mercer County.

Today took Mary antiquing in Lambertville, then had Graham ride his bike home from school, on which route we passed by a full panoply of Princeton Borough employees (maybe 7 of them) and trucks (perhaps 6), collecting leaves from the gutters with big vacuums, claws, rakes, what have you, the important principle being to use the equipment because, by god, it belongs to the municipality.

Nervously looking towards next week, when the commute into Manhattan kicks off. Will I have to catch a 6:07 train? Stay tuned. Whatever happens, the blog will live on, but it's gonna be harder to feed daily.

Chew your Hallmark

This was the first year Graham really got transfixed by the tree. And he really did.














Meanwhile, down the hill at Craig and Karen's house, they were going a little bit over the top with a gingerbread house. Here's Natalie and Vivian with the tasty masterpiece.

Highlights of the day

Went to dentist. The good news is I need only one cavity. The bad news is that tooth's already so drilled out I need a frickin crown. Which will cost. Luckily will soon have dental insurance. In the dentist chair I was bombarded by bad Christmas country music.

Went to mall to beef up office casual side of closet. At mall was bombarded by bad Christmas music of all varieties. Reminds why I steer clear of mall.

Went to hardware store to pick up caulking and sandpaper brick for project on 2nd floor landing. In the parking lot, came face to face with road rage, Princeton style. A fellow WASP dad, apparently enraged at the lack of parking on one row, gunned the engine of his ca 2002 hunter green Accord and went the wrong way down a clearly marked one-way alley, thus impeding my forward progress. I lay fiercely into the mighty horn of my 2001 S40, but he was not afeared one whit.

At bedtime, Natalie, having gotten a jumpstart on 2008 with the January issue of Highlights, burst into Graham's room with some fresh comic material:
"What do April showers bring?" (she asks)
"Ummm.., May flowers" (me)
"And what do May flowers bring?"
I should have known this, but didn't. A trick question. The answer will come in tomorrow's edition.

The Rule of Law

At a conference at Yale a couple of weeks ago on international stuff there was much chin-waddling and brow-furrowing on the importance of rule of law for having a country run smoothly and grow up to be polite. But, I ask, what do you really need for rule of law? Just laws and an independent judiciary, or a populace that internalizes the law? The letter -- which killeth, or the spirit -- which giveth life?

Immediately post Enron / Tyco etc. there was much hue and cry about how US GAAP accounting standards encouraged a literalist bent, which in turn fostered cheating, while the European IASC standards were more principles-based -- which gave us Parmalat and others. Now the same debate goes on between the SEC's rules orientation and the British FSA's principle-based approach. And Sarbanes-Oxley is demonized for pushing firms to list on foreign exchanges.

When is rule of law too much law? Go to Germanic Europe and people get all pissy if you so much as jaywalk. Fat lot of good is does them.

What would Jesus Buy?

Everybody run out and see this new movie, about America's greatest Situationist Gospel choir, with musical direction by our own William Moses. About materialism and America and Christmas. As if people don't want the Peanuts special year in year out: "All it needs is a little love."

In fact, many if not quite all of the great Xmas movies down through the years to some extent satirize the holiday's commercial focus, don't they, from A Miracle on 34th St and It's a Wonderful Life to one of my personal faves, The Homecoming with Ed Asner. The holiday, we learn, all comes back to real human contact and caring.

In the end, I think, these movies are nothing more than palate cleansers after a rush to the mall, a way of saying: "Oh yeah, that's what I meant by the $1200 I put on my card today."

What would Jesus Buy? promises more. Real, hard-hitting, Yes Men like freak you out performance art at the mall. With real singin.

The 20th Hijacker?

It is, in fact, Shel Silverstein, author of children's classics. Coulda fooled me. Doesn't quite look the part, does he?

Parkour Jr.

This morning Graham running back and forth on the 2nd floor landing in sweatpants with his shirt off, twirling the shirt around his arm while shrieking reminded me of some of those Parkour guys I've checking out on YouTube. Fearless. Pearless. Fierce.

If only he could master the dark, fetid one. Or should I say "two"?

Meanwhile, I've been inspecting the Nancy Drew books Natalie inherited from Caroline, and from Leslie and Joan before her. The great thing about these mysteries is there's no messing about. The enigma is introduced in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence. Someone literally bursts in the door or up the front steps: "Nancy. You won't believe what a mystery I've stumbled onto." And they're off.

Par for the kour

Going through a stack of old New Yorkers today I saw an article about David Belle and Parkour, which is basically crazy skateboarder ninja shit without the boards, the kind of thing I used to speculate about when I was younger and, under the right (or the wrong) circumstances, actually nipped at. I watched some videos of Belle and, though he's incredibly impressive athletically, he's more swagger than grace most of the time. And a terrible moustache.

But this video, of nameless dudes the globe around doing parkour, is pretty infectious. This is fun stuff. Sadly, I am now too old for most of this stuff.

Graham, the formative years. Wellesley, Tgiving '07

Dictated to dad by Graham

A Bird Called Treelimber

Chapter 1 He had a tree. He made a house out of old tree trunks with his crane. Then it was done by Don. Then he had a big big supper: banana ice cream and zinger. He had dessert: Jon Bamberville Coggler.

Chapter 2 He went off for his other friends: Doggler, Gong, Jogger, and Daxxener. And they were other birdies too.

Chapter 3 He didn't do anything. He just went to bed.

Where are the editors?

At my friend Danny's recommendation have been reading Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire. There is much to recommend this book. The guy is generally enthusiastic about his plants and has some interesting stuff to say.

However (and you knew it was coming), sometimes the Grouse just wishes the guy would pay attention to what he's doing. Check this out:

Actually, the apples and the man (Johnny Chapman "Appleseed") have suffered a similar fate in the years since they journeyed down the Ohio together in Chapman's hull. (ok. he's got us set up for his analogy). Both then had the tang of strangeness about them, and both have long since been sweetened beyond recognition. (point made) Figures of tart wildness, both have been thoroughly domesticated -- Chapman transformed into a benign Saint Francis of the American frontier, the apple into a blemish-free plastic-red saccharine orb. (point made again) "Sweetness without dimension" is how one pomologist described the Red Delicious; the same might be said of the Johnny Appleseed promulgated by Walt Disney and several generations of American children's book writers. (point made thrice). In both cases a cheap, fake sweetness has been substituted for the real thing, (point hammered home mercilessly)... blah blah blah at last he moves on.

Is that really a paragraph, I ask you, or just reps in a gruelling session of verbal aerobics?

MassPike November night. 1988 vs 2007

Have been hitting the Massachusetts Turnpike (or "MassPike") a lot recently. A few weeks back I headed up there for some conversations and, on a hypo-blustery November night, I recalled the time back in '88 when I had cruised this same road in on my way to Bowdoin for the Mayakovsky play we did, back and forth from Maine to Connecticut, from romance to romance. I was the frickin man, it seemed at the time, though I smelled and had not a kopeck to my name.

And as I cruised along a few weeks back it struck me how little had changed in some ways: then I had an Accord inherited from my mom, today a similarly sized Volvo passed down by my sister and brother in law. Tunes cranked mightily in each car (though now more cello than guitar), and soda flowed freely, though now it's diet. But now no smoke, no smoke. And I know not to eat ketchup in the car now.

In '88 I was a wildman, utterly clueless about career direction, save that it would be outrageous in some way. And now my cluelessness has diminished marginally, though questions persist. Time will tell. Real soon.

And from galavanting Eurotrash thrift-store playboy I've settled down into mighty dad, dutiful husband and slogging Metro area salaryman. Things are better now, though the lore is less riveting.

The Undervilification of NASCAR

In from the surprisingly gentle holiday road, had that rarest of all things, a thought.

In the gradual greening of American political discourse, SUVs have been pretty easy targets, they're big, unmaneuverable, and silly. Anecdotally at least, sales have been declining of and on from at least 2005 forward, moving roughly in opposite directions from the price of oil.

But there's still the problem of the overhorsepowering of cars in general and the surfeit of power that results. Everybody craves power and acceleration, even if they don't / can't use it, given how crowded the roads are. Everybody wants to drive like the legendary Billy Bobby.

So why don't green leaders attack NASCAR? The stock car racing circuit -- and indeed auto racing in general, is clearly a bad influence on the way people, probably mostly guys, drive and feel about their cars. The circuit encourages car fetishization, big-time emissions and probably contributes to highway mortality too. What are the externalities of NASCAR? Has anybody measured them?

So why don't the Democrats go to war with NASCAR? Cuz they're too busy sucking up to it. "NASCAR Democrats" were a prized Grail that John Edwards and his strategists cast from their homespun Teflon a few years back. So we understand their reticence, but bemoan it still.

So what about Leonardo di Caprio and George Clooney and other Hollywood do-goodniks, why don't they go toe-to-toe with the heirs of the great Darrell Waltrip? Probably because those who would go to a stock car race are amongst the few who can still stand how loud movies are in theaters. No seriously, NASCAR is a big biz with big demographics. But it's evil, and should be vilified.

Feeling better...

...after some delicious quiche, The Giving Tree, and some improved incoming email traffic.

Don't want to head into the holiday with a negative groove, particularly after so many of you regulars have stopped by to sip at the font of grousedom.

Best Buy, worst buy

Lets flashback to April 21, 2007 for a moment, shall we? At that time, our LG dishwasher went kaput and Best Buy embarked on a long and tortuous quest to further besmirch its brand. So the other night I start the dishwasher before going up to bed and I hear an odd sound and I think "Oh whatever", and in the morning the dishwasher is stopped and it's flashing an "LE" error signal, and we know from experience that that means the motor is hosed. And for some naive reason we think that Best Buy should know this too, since this is their business.

So Mary calls in and tells the woman on the phone that there's an "LE" error, assuming that she'll transmit that to the repair guy who'll know to bring a frickin motor. Tuesday comes, and of course he doesn't bring one. He comes in, sees water pooling in there and an "LE" signal and says: "Yup, it's the motor." And I think you see where this is going. He says he'll personally call in the order for the part that day, but...

Best Buy sucks. LG sucks.

Thank jah we're not cooking for the holiday. We're driving. Which should put us in Clark W. Griswold territory once more. Stay tuned.

The Money Shot

Watching the greatest hits of Antiques Roadshow this evening over soup with some kale in it (yes, we are pathetic old people), was struck by how quasi-pornographic the narrative of each item is. We learn some history, some provenance, but everybody's also waiting around for that estimate from the expert. When they cut to the dollars too quick, you feel cheated. Finally the big moment comes, and you watch the owners react: overwhelmed, underwhelmed, what? One woman actually cried tonight at the huge dollar figure she heard, which wasn't all that big, and she didn't even let peep the obligatory "but of course I'm not gonna sell it." She was off to Vegas, baby, where what happens there stays there.

Munich

Spielberg is pretty much the Teflon director, but this 2hour 40 minute piece of work shows he's going the way of all non-stick cookware. For some reason, the critics liked this movie about pissed off tough-but-with-a-heart-of-gold Jews busting out all over evil A-rabs in the 70s. Perhaps it was because it had all the good looks that a Spielberg-sized budget can get you: handsome cast, exotic settings, trenchcoats, sideburns, and lots of fashionable period cars (Lancias, Alphas, Citroens, Beemers and generic Euroclunkers). Or because the Israelis were so pious about duty and their Heimat and all that.

Or because they had a hot naked female corpse. Or a sex scene during which our hero (lil) Abner imagines the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich airport. I dunno. It struck me as an excuse for some action scenes and post 9/11 pieties both about both the need to kill off Muslim baddies and the Sisyphean futility of so doing. A truly great director would do better.

Settle down, now, little network

LinkedIn would appear to be having some issues figuring out how to use itself, as are so many people. Its Questions feature, which initially seemed so fruitful as a means of pinging and benchmarking, quickly got coopted by a bunch of perky self-promoters who answer questions on anything and everything just to raise their visibility, as if anybody has opinions on that diverse a range of topics worth pushing out to a large network (when they come to you, it's different).

Now LinkedIn serves me a full week of my network members informing me about questions answered, changes to profiles, additions of pictures, like I care. If I want frickin Flickr I'll go there. My splash page takes up my whole screen, so I have to scroll, and lord knows I hate scrolling.

Little Miss Serious

Natalie has turned into a fairly serious girl, much of the time. She's often reading, hitting, kicking, frowning, or otherwise putting on airs. Or making a mess. And she insists on closing the door when she puts on jammies. Clearly, she is becoming a big girl.

And then I start to tickle her, and she shrieks, twists and giggles at the top of her lungs just like she did when she was two, an almost cinematic regression. I wonder how long this will last.

Beirut

To listen to Zach Condon of Beirut is to love him, and to wonder how a 19-year old (when he launched) could both have and realize such a vision, even with a talented crew around him. And yet, to see his videos is at times to wish to kick his scrawny ass. On YouTube it's clear there's a cult of personality abrewin', and you can tell he knows darn good and well how talented he is.

For the same song there can be a video which is almost Mansonesque in its adoration.


And one that is shear beauty(are these his family movies? Is that him on the skateboard?)


The first two records hold up and are quite a contribution to pop. One wonders how the third will turn out.

One things certain, I'll go hear him and the band play, cult or no.

The Office Hotel

There is a place in Manhattan, OK many of them, where virtual enterprises thrive. The office hotel is a wierd netherworld, something like the gumshoe land of noire of yore, where corporate homunculi such as yours truly pass in the night of day. Businesses to be and becoming nest in this demimonde for a premium, sharing kitchen, whiteboard and receptionist. Gloria, who manned the desk at the one on the 20th floor of 14 Wall Street, said she answered the phone for at least 50 companies. And each one of them convincingly, from what I heard.

People in the office hotels are, oddly, mellower than in normal offices, as if they know they're not going to make it. There is a wierd transient anonymity to it all. You have to wonder if there's more office sex going on in the hotel than in the normal office.

I haven't seen any just yet. But I'll keep my eyes out.

A desert of lunch

Midtown in the East 50s is becoming a less and less interesting place to pop out for lunch. It's all neo-burger this and hearty and hale soups that and salad tossers and Mongolian frickin bbq and chestnut chicken salad blah blah blah. The pizza is generally very lame.

You've got all these well-accessorized boys and girls sashaying about tickling their little crackberries. Today I saw a guy in a lime green jacket that set off all gaydars except he had the the sweetest little baby sleeping in his stroller. I guess he was just rich.

There is, however, a schwarma place outside the E train Lex Ave stop, which is pretty good and gives a fine portion. And there is, come to think of it, one dive Chinese steam table joint. And some lunch trucks up by Park Ave with falafel and whatnot, so the kid will pull through. But not without protest.

Apologia 2.0

Dear Grousereaders,

In recent days and weeks, when reading my site visit stats, I have noted a sad trend towards a diminution of visits by returning visitors, offset only by a steady stream of needle-dicked rednecks googling "Grizzly Chew," and a mysteriously high number of random visitors googling "Hamilton baton competition." This is what I call cheap traffic. While I take some pride in attracting such an odd cocktail of web-surfers, I nonetheless view the decrease in recidivism amongst my usual readers as, well, a bummer.

I apologize for the occasional lameness of the posting, afflicted as I have been by a virtual Barton Finkery of idealessness, and as all too much of my attention has been diverted onto the pursuit of the mighty ducat. Henceforth I promise to write once more from the gut, from the nose, from the grouse, with renewed vrigor (that's the kind of word Bush might use).

MC-T

Up and down they go. Who wins?

The markets sure are excitable these days. Up then down, mostly down for a while, if still not yet getting to the 10% retrenchment that would mean that we could technically call it a correction.

One things for sure, hedge funds have been bitching and moaning for a long time about how there's not enough volatility in the markets for them to make money. Because they're so smart, they gotst so much alpha.

So I'm looking forward to the end of 4th quarter numbers for the hedge fund industry as a whole. They should be instructive, and should tell us who's been earning their money.

The kid, that's who.

In lieu of text

Honest I've been busy, keep meaning to write.

Of Balzac and money

Thinking about money recently, so I decided to re-read Balzac's totally killer Eugenie Grandet, with its portrait of her miserly father, clearly one of the greatest misers in world lit (right up with Frank Norris' Trina McTeague and Pushkin's delusional skinflint knight. And I was not disappointed, indeed, I'm shocked at how the guy's money obsession totally permeates the whole novel, not just the climactic scene when he revels in his golden loot.

Still reading, but one thing's clear: me and this rich French dude may each be cheap, but I ain't no sick fuck like that. In general a good read, worth coming back to it.

(prediction: some pun about my Balzac and enhancement products)

Correction

It has been brought to the Grouse's attention that Josh Stein did not, in fact, bid for the hand of the fighting 16th district of the North Carolina State Senate, but is rather -- in the slow-cooking style of the South -- preparing for a primary tussle in May to be followed by a general election next November. By then his campaign will have the smoky essence of fatback and salt fully simmered in, and throngs of the curious will cluster round to sip raucously from its pot-liquor.

All of this is well, good and -- potentially -- delicious. What may trouble some voters and grousereaders, however, is Stein's grievous ethical lapse in failing to inform your humble blogger of his error, preferring instead to let his masterfully airbrushed family photo grace the present URL.

Mostly, however, we can all rejoice that Stein's candidacy will offer us another twelve months of satirical opportunities, for those slow blogging days when there's little else to write about.

Look out for the kid

All indications are that our boy Josh Stein will be lighting it up in the swingin 16th district this evening. After leaving all other contenders in the dust in the all important money collecting competition early in the race, Josh swung into full gear and lashed his boyish looks and considerably more handsome family to his web site, accompanied by a few choice bullet points which we are at present to tired to parody.

In other news, lets all wish a chew your grouse birthday to the one known as Zeke, one of our most inveterate readers, who has long since outlived most of his hair but whose handle and jumper live on.

100 things to do

And I did, like, 88 of them today, so I guess I'm doing OK. The question is, should I whittle it down to 50 so I can do 48? Sometimes I feel like I'm dangerously overdiversified, and there is, shall we say, evidence to support this hypothesis. But somehow I keep making it through the day.

One thing I did do, I'll have you know, is finish painting my front steps, which I was scandalized to see totally looked like shit in the Halloween picture I posted here a few days back on.... Halloween. I will post again on the metaphysics of house painting one day soon.

Since today's post is turning into a grab bag, lets just take a moment to celebrate the great anniversary of the October Revolution, which was celebrated today in Russia, as it is every year, in November. How 'bout them apples?

Deer bait

Call me a naive city slicker, but I had no idea there were companies out there selling licks and chews to attract wild animals to your backyard so you could shoot them. Us, we always go to considerable length to keep the tulip-eating buggers away. OK, Mary does. But there's all manner of stuff out there to attract em.

'Mon back and set a spell

I'd like to take a moment to say hello to all of you who are visiting from Felix Salmon's Market Movers over at Portfolio.com and who have bothered to come to the root URL of the blog. Both of these actions make you curious, and therefore a likely reader for this blog, which could concern just about anything on any given day. Anything, that is, likely to come into the path or mind of a New Jersey dad who comes into the city with reasonable frequency, but scurries home with the masses to put his kids to bed. And it's always, always done in 15 minutes or less.

From Derrida to Derivatives

It will be interesting to see if securitization becomes a bad word just like "theory" did at some point in time, while its tenets and practices continue to proliferate, even as they call forth literalist backlash. Indeed, I have to wonder if there's a genetic or causal relationship between the rise of theory and the subsequent universalization of securitization. Both really took off in the eighties, but securitization got more and more abstract as theory got sort of corraled and beat down into little ghettos, even as many of its thought patterns flowed out into the mainstream press via the relatively hip journalist crowd. Securitization and the various theory schools (deconstruction, feminism, new historicism) etc. are famously jargon-ridden, opaque, and slippery, but also draw out analogies you wouldn't think of and, once you ponder it, just plain old make sense. Sometimes.

But one commentator, Frank Partnoy of San Diego, has built a career on saying that what the Wall St. of the 90s forward has done is make things so complex that purchasers can't understand them, but buying them made them feel au courant. Retail consumers who bought complex and ill-suited mortgages also felt deucedly clever, until they got bit.

Halloween intentions

Despite earlier rumors that he would appear as an "ampire," Graham has let it be known that he will once more boycott the trick-or-treat proceedings, or at least that he will skip the costume portion.

We'll have an update from Natalie, who is honing strategies for candy maximization, tomorrow as the festivities approach.

Neon Bible

All the advance press on The Arcade Fire's second record had me expecting greater experimentation than their first outing, Funeral. So at first listen, I was underwhelmed. I was driving, so I kept on listening. Turns out, it does indeed rock, even without any power chords.

The first record was, I thought, all about the Pixies. While that's not gone, it's now mixed in Springsteen and a hint of Pogues, but at the end of the day they've got their own sound, progressively layering and delayering horns, organs, accordions, what have you, while keeping a driving beat.

They're downright cinematic. At their best, each song is a short film.

They should make some money on this, particularly if they can get both the vaunted 18-34 demographic to snap it up as well as oldsters like me.

Kafka, 2.0

Our singer is called Josephine. Anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song. There is no one but is carried away by her singing, a tribute all the greater as we are not in general a music-loving race. Tranquil peace is the music we love best; our life is hard, we are no longer able, even on occasions when we have tried to shake off the cares of daily life, to rise to anything so high and remote from our usual routine as music... Among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine's singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary.

Is it in fact singing at all? Although we are unmusical we have a tradition of singing; in the old days our people did sing; this is mentioned in legends and some songs have actually survived, which, it is true, no one can now sing. Thus we have an inkling of what singing is, and Josephine’s art does not really correspond to it. So is it singing at all? Is it not perhaps just a piping? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real artistic accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment but a characteristic expression of our life. We all pipe, but of course no one dreams of making out that our piping is an art, we pipe without thinking of it, indeed without noticing it, and there are even many among us who are quite unaware that piping is one of our characteristics. So if it were true that Josephine does not sing but only pipes and perhaps, as it seems to me at least, hardly rises above the level of our usual piping—yet, perhaps her strength is not even quite equal to our usual piping, whereas an ordinary farmhand can keep it up effortlessly all day long, besides doing his work—if that were all true, then indeed Josephine's alleged vocal skill might be disproved, but that would merely clear the ground for the real riddle which needs solving, the enormous influence she has.

Franz Kafka, "Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk"

If Borges and his Croatian doppelganger Danilo Kish are the intellectual visionaries of the unlimited scale of the internet and 2.0, Kafka is its true sage.

Reading this weekend of Tila Tequila and her 1.8 million Facebook buddies and her new reality show, it's hard not to reflect on 2.0 and reality TV and YouTube and YouPorn so on, much as I've restrained myself in the past. What does it mean that we're making so much content, so many pictures of ourselves? Does it make it easier for us to define and express ourselves, or are we just kidding ourselves waiting for the next hero? Does what is expressed matter, or does the act of expression suffice? Does it let us free ourselves, or does it complicate coordinated effort by making it more difficult to get on the same page?

And as soon as I invoke Borges -- prophet of infinitely extensive libraries and consciousness -- in this context, I hear Baudrillard tiptoeing in the back:

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Where does the blogosphere -- this great collective soul -- stand vis-a-vis its referent?

The sports page

Morality tales: In recent NY Times PLAY magazine, we have Steve Nash, the intensely focused and driven eluder of obstacles, who glows and flows and does the right thing for charity and society and so on and so forth.

And then there's marathoner Alberto Salazar, the intensely focused and driven bust-througher of obstacles who burns out and crashes early, even dies prematurely from intensity/heart attack earlier this year, before getting fibrillated back to give born-again lectures to devout crowds.

Two sides of the same coin. How do you know which is which when they're 14, 16, 21? Is it random?

At one point in time Salazar tells the tale of seeing a drowned boy pulled from a pond near Boston. He reflects: "I guess another boy might have prayed that such a terrible thing would never happen to him. He would pray, in other words, that he would never die. But I didn't prary for that kind of mercy. I asked God that when my time came to die, I wouldn't be afraid. Well, my prayer was answered." Talk about competitive. He's trying to outpray imaginary adversaries. Way to go!

New Haven

It is somehow ironic that I should have such warm feelings for a place where, in retrospect, I must have been so unhappy. Around most very corner in the City of Elms is the memory of a longing, most of them routinely sated, no matter who said what. It is not unlike the way in which the approval of those who reject me is so important to me.

In so many ways, New Haven has flavor and texture, where Princeton is all sustenance and presentation.



Went to the Doodle, had cheeseburgers.

Burning

It's easy to watch TV and see fires burning in the California hills and just be like: "Well, that sucks". At least it's easy for me.

But it gets kind of different when you're talking to someone who's out there. A few minutes back I was on the phone with some guy in a seaside town right close to San Diego. This is a guy who is the mastermind of a 3-in-1 flashlight that has a bright light to blind someone 20 feet away, point a targeting laser at them, and blast them with some hardcore pepper spray so they're really blind and writhing in pain on the ground. Sounds like a bummer, but it beats being shot dead. And here's this longtime military and then postmilitary guy who's probably close to really retiring if he's not retired, with a sweet crib down by the sea which is on the point of total and utter destruction. Talking to someone right in the eye of the storm puts it all in perspective, that's for sure.

Does the Universe Have a (Special) Purpose?

The John Templeton Foundation has inaugurated a series of "conversations" on "Big Questions" populated by a variety of high-end talking heads from science and other disciplines, but mostly from science because, as we all know, scientists are just smarter and can switch hit to the speculative domain of the humanities much more easily than we can science because, after all, their abstruse noodlings are empirically grounded.

Sadly, all too often these, the talkingest scientific heads of a generation, can scarcely surpass the presumed logic of one Navin R. Johnson, Steve Martin's Jerk, who might have answered the Templeton's question: "I too have a special purpose!"*

David Gelernter of Yale states resoundingly "yes", the universe has a purpose:
"Namely, to defeat and rise above our animal natures; to create goodness, beauty, and holiness
where only physics and animal life once existed; to create what might be (if we succeed) the only tiny pinprick of goodness in the universe–which is otherwise (so far as we know) morally null and void." OK yeah yeah. This is scientist taking license pretty bad, but it gets worse:

"Why seek goodness?

Because most humans desire goodness. For most (not all!) humans, this urge is easily ignored in the short term, but nearly impossible to uproot over the long haul."

This is all nicey nice, but it's not a strong argument for anything, and he's at least pretending to operate in an argumentative vein.

Now, we gotta give the guy credit not because he's Joe Scientist, but because he's one of the people who got seriously mauled by a package from the Unibomber, causing him serious damage to one hand, to which he alludes at the end of his little disquisition: "But as Job teaches us, we must play the hand we are dealt." So he's utterly admirable for his generosity of spirit, but really pretty lame on the depth of thought side of things.

Lots of others (Jane Goodall, Elie Wiesel) hold forth on the question of purpose with varying degrees of interest and sophistication, but in the end it just gets boring.


*I.e. a penis.

Serenity

This movie, i.e. the one called Serenity, rocks. What else to say? Star Wars knock-off with a no-star cast and a kick-ass heroine. Gotta love it.

Though my life is certainly much improved with my own parking spot at Princeton Junction and the double-decker trains they got running in the morning. Seats for all, seemingly. It's like I've had an upgrade, save for the fact that I'm commuting to Manhattan. We'll see how long this lasts.

Walnuts

There are black walnut trees in our backyard, and they are toxic to all too many plants, as are their leaves and nuts and other spawn. So each year when that stuff comes down we rake and clean it up and haul it to the curb.

The walnuts aren't big on being raked, so we have to go after them with hands and receptacles. When a child is still young enough to be gullible, he/she may be duped into joining in. As it was with Natalie, so it is with Graham, giving us a mild "family togetherness" moment.

But Graham has proven lucky. This year the walnuts can be put into buckets, as compared with prior years when there were seemingly thousands and we had to put them in garbage cans and forcibly haul them to the curb. I remember clearly saying at the time that the massive production of nuts was a homeostatic response to draught or global warming, that the tree gave off all these nuts because it wanted to preserve the species by reproducing (foiled!). But this year is kind of a draught too, what gives?

We should perhaps do some research or ask an arborist. But what fun is there in that?

Eyeballs and Chicken Pot Pie

There was an article in the Sunday Times Business Section about how there was an outbreak of MacNasty salmonella which befell people who had eaten undernuked chicken pot pies. There were, like, 150 instances of this nationwide. First off, let me say hats off to the CDC for aggregating that data and figuring out the common etiology of all this salmonella. This is truly an unironic instance of our tax dollars at work.

So the manufacturers (Conagra and others, methinks) clearly know that this is a problem of labelling and communication on pie boxes, letting consumers know about the different power ratings of microwaves and how much nuking it takes for each type to kill the little boogers.

But.....

The real problem isn't just getting the right text on the box, which would satisfy Legal. No, you've gotta be sure people will read the box. Product boxes are competing for eyeballs with all the other millions of ways marketers are trying to get to consumers. The same Business Section had an article on how Nike and others are veering further and further from traditional push marketing into all kinds of ways to build customer affinity. A little salmonella might get people to sit up and read, but for how long?

Shoot Out the Lights

Released in 1982, this was to be Richard and Linda Thompson's last album as a pair, and one of their last acts as a married couple. Critics go back and forth as to whether the album is "about" the upcoming divorce, which is kind of irrelevant. The break was surely in the making, as these things don't typically pop up overnight, even if the affair that brings them to light may.

And so, the record, maker of numerous best ever lists. For me it's all encapsulated in the last minute of song two, "Walking on a Wire." With Linda in the lead, Richard steps in to sing a "harmonic" back up, and all of a sudden they're singing together but apart like nothing you've ever heard, two strong, expressive voices fighting for supremacy, warbling and weaving around each other like the Blue Angels on Oxycontin. And there's undoubtedly some foretaste of a marriage on the way out here, however comely and compelling the form, like a vocal shard of the early Andy Gill gliding into a ballad.

Ron Paul on Nassau St.

Well, not exactly. Just saw a non High-Net Worth black woman and her probable teenage son (in beltless baggies and a sweatshirt, not prepped out like Obama-Cosby junior) carrying a big Ron Paul placard and passing out campaign lit. This was surprising to me. Ron Paul's political vision does not seem like one which would be huge amongst the lower-income of-color set. Were this woman and her younger companion in fact paid political operatives? That would be classic disruptive agitprop.

It makes me feel like Ron Paul is a conservative version of the creeping leftist infection of John Malkovich's The Dancer Upstairs. If you haven't seen this movie, RENT IT NOW, and then you'll know what I mean.

RDU

Trapped beneath a television blaring ESPN, surrounded by dudes with hair of note both facial and other. Hard to think.

Just left my laptop at security after the security fellows had to do an "exterior check" on my back, looking for what, explosive traces? Pretty scary. And it's not even Halloween yet. Gotta run.

Tech 2007

Down at the Council on Entrepreneurial Development's Tech 2007 conference, it flew fast and furious. Over here Dayjet CEO Ed Iacobucci played George Bush on the aircraft carrier, declaring victory over a complex optimization problem after 52 live flights. Yeah yeah. Talk to me after 10,000. He also talked in detail about his personal history, which was really enlightening.

In the exhibition hall some dudes displayed some mushrooms they used to grow drugs. Mmmmhmmm. There was all manner of other boring medical crap, and my heart pined for some financial apps. They most slam-bam med app was this 360 degree modelling thing that looked like it targeted cosmetic surgery. Why am I not shocked? Magnus Health Portal is a sleeper. Good technology, but better business model and attitude.

The CTO of Nokia/Ericsson song and danced about the future of the cell phone. Soon, you'll be able to buy your sandwich, drag and drop files from one phone to another, and wipe your ass with it too. There were so many features have you wonder what use it could ever be to an aging population. No doubt, telecoms and devices generally need an Oxo, somebody to have a culture oriented towards building devices targeted at the boomers and older. He showed multiple videos of what were basically commercials, which was pretty weak.

In the zone

Just flew down from Philly to NC. You would think that some kind of excitement would happen. Did not.

Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen. Cheerwine. Next Dip's. Livin the life...

(4 hours later)
Actually, going to Dip's brought back a bunch of memories. Somehow this restaurant has gotten by for 20-odd years, but the service always sucks and tonight the food was basically no good too. The cornbread was tasty, but the barbeque was crappy and the chicken and dumplings, which I thought a signature dish, bit as well. And we waited 40 minutes for this, not because of the wait but because the cooks were having dinner. When I worked in a restaurant we ate before the shift. This place is shittily managed and would appear to basically coast on a reputation it somehow earned.

At long last

It's raining outside and it's hard to focus on anything else. Everything is dry and brown and so on, though the grass on the front lawn died, we ripped it up and planted more and the little dudes are just burgeoning.

I can't help but to feel guilty because it's much nastier dry in Chapel Hill, though the chance of relief is set at 50% tonight.

I'll see tomorrow.



In other news check out Blogger Play, which lets you monitor in "real-time" images as they are uploaded to the Blogger server. It's 2.0 at its rawest, like a visual Twitter that you don't even have to go to.

This weekend's flix

Because of the holiday, we watched to movies, not one. Crazy.

Water
This Indian film about pre-war Indian widows living together like untouchables in the olden way could have sucked, but did not. It hit some hard and honest notes without lingering on them, and the plot resisted the most pathetic of happy ending cliches, opting for some tragic / hopeful cliches instead. The white Indian chick was totally hot.

Year of the Dog
Call us suckers, with Molly Shannon at the wheel we thought this was gonna be funny. And we did laugh at times. But most of the time it was a quasi-clinical look at a descent into psychosis. With dogs. Don't watch it, even though some of the acting is flat out 'ler.

Marion Jones and UNC

I'm not in Chapel Hill, so I can't see what all the local talking heads (Chansky and whatnot) are saying, but if I were in the Athletics Department at UNC, I'd be a little concerned with my long-term track record this week. UNC has skated through years of hassling by the NCAA with no reprimands or serious cases being brought against it to my recollection. Somehow. We all know UNC isn't as pure as it likes to project, and we've seen and heard evidence.

But once the really big dawgs leave UNC, they tend to get involved in a scandal or too. Think about Lawrence Taylor and his caine, Michael Jordan and his wagering, James Worthy and them hookers. Now Marion comes along and tells us she was doing steroids at her peak moment.

Duke players, by comparison, just mess themselves up. Think Bobby Hurley and his pickup truck, Jason Richardson and his fly cycle, and Christian Laettner, Jay Bilas and the rest of the big white lunks with their generally useless selves. Grant Hill has a messed-up knee but is clean and ready to run for political office if he'll just get organized.

Something about UNC's untouchable status seems to make its big stars think they're above the law. Now lets wait to find out what they get Mia Hamm for.

The sly ones

Coming back from the phleb lab today, I tapped my brakes appropriately when I came around the bend and saw a Princeton Borough cruiser lurking there on the grass side of the street. But then, as I passed it, I could see there was no fuzz in there and it was just our tax dollars at work. The Princeton Police, with its infinite and well-rested staff and its surfeit of late-model cars, left a decoy on the side of the road.

Now, in and of itself, there's nothing really new to that, empty cop cars are often left on the side of the road as a deterrent. But usually they're visible from far away, so that they deter maximally. No no, Princeton is sneakier than that, it hides them so that -- instead of scaring drivers in a specific moment, it instills in them a general fear that there might be a cop lurking behind any corner or hedge. This is not unlike the practice of Stalin's secret police of randomly arresting and killing innocent people who had no idea what they'd done (nothing) just to instill fear in the populace at large. Admittedly, what the Princeton cops do is less fatal. OK. Fine.

But still.

A triumph!

Graham just after bedtime alerted me and then pooped in the potty for the 3rd time in a row, thereby earning himself the Thomas the Train Rock Crusher which he had been so coveting and which had been promised him. After we opened the crusher and he played for a bit, I put him in his bed again, and as I passed by his door a couple of times I heard him blowing copious kisses my way.

Now lets just see if he can keep it up.

Downtown. Not quite nostalgia.

• 8:00 AM Diner on Bway in Tribeca – Wood panelling. Lots of grey and also old people. 60ish woman reads hardcover mystery from public library, pulls out NYC DOT employee badge on a shoelace at 8:30. Fidgets with lace to get it to lay right around her neck.
  
• 10:30AM Café at W3rd and Bway – basement “stylish” bar, red paint, black toilet, smell of stale beer, not really far from He’s Not Here, just a different skin
• 11:15AM Step-down Used book store North of Houston on Mercer
  
• I don’t know the fiction authors
• Lit crit authors, not surprisingly, I do know, have not changed
• Sections for "Computers" and "Computers of the Past"
  
• 11:25 DayGlo Orange Lamborghini on Mercer in Soho. No surprises there

My loyal readers...

Will surely appreciate that I got a hit today from the following locale.

Tehran, Tehran, Iran, Islamic Republic Of,

The visitor had found me by googling "Jaguar Enhancement Cream"

Thanks, team, for helping me rope em in.

How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)

In this biopic we learn many things about Melvin Van Peebles:

• He worked in many genres: jazz, film, fiction, television commentary, floor trading
  
• He was smart and determined and disciplined
• He had more lives than a cat, and more lovers than a dog
• He was not bereft of ego
• He influenced many

What this film does not demonstrate, however, is that he did anything particularly well, even speaking French. His masterpiece and true claim to fame (other than son Mario) Sweet Sweetback's Baaadaasssssssss Song is an important film, sure, a powerful film, sorta, but it's durned hard to watch, as I remember. Except for the sex scene. Hollywood may have cheapened and perverted it to cook up blaxploitation, but in so doing it made better movies. It's like America's version of Makaveyev's Sweet Movie or the Russian I Am Cuba or the earlier Vertov/Eisenstein days, one long stiff lecture, perhaps with sex.

The French gave made him a Knight of the Foreign Legion, but God knows what they did for Jerry Lewis, and they eat snails.

Stewart and the Phantom of Liberty

For those of you who missed it a couple of weeks back., John Stewart had Bolivian President Evo Morales on his show, with a translator, a first in my memory for a prime time show. It was pretty surreal, with echoes of Bunuel and perhaps even Woody Allen's Bananas. Morales gazes lovingly at Stewart, and speaks at once in the most delicate and high-falutin idealistic language, next in a down to earth way about accomplishments and Stewart fawns on him with his doe eyes and feeds him softballs.

It was a very odd bit of primetime TV -- , but one that could only happen on the John Stewart show, or, during Colbert's book review. Between the two of them, hosting lefties and righties alike, these two goofballs have raised the bar of popular political and intellectual discourse in ways we couldn't have dreamed of 15 years ago. Nobody puts simple farmer poet Bolivian politicians on TV. This gives us a taste of the rest of the world's political delusions, and a break from our own.

The Lumberjack's Swan Song

Went to the mall today to return a summer shirt that Mary had vetoed and pick up a flannel shirt. There were no flannel shirts to be had, and chamois was right out.

What can we say about this. Clearly, the income gap and the internet and whatnot have changed things since we were in high school, when there was a smoky anti-glamor to the construction worker and the worker in general, the days when the likes of Burt Reynolds and John Voight went around slamming pickup truck doors with tall boys in their hands in movies from Silkwood to Smoky and the Bandit to the frickin Deerhunter. A time when Bob and Doug McKenzie could at least exist. Flannel ain't cool no more.