The Malaise Speech

Jimmy Carter, July 1979. This took guts, and got him fired.

Good evening.

This is a special night for me. Exactly 3 years ago, on July 15, 1976, I accepted the nomination of my party to run for President of the United States. I promised you a President who is not isolated from the people, who feels your pain, and who shares your dreams and who draws his strength and his wisdom from you.

During the past 3 years I've spoken to you on many occasions about national concerns, the energy crisis, reorganizing the Government, our Nation's economy, and issues of war and especially peace. But over those years the subjects of the speeches, the talks, and the press conferences have become increasingly narrow, focused more and more on what the isolated world of Washington thinks is important. Gradually, you've heard more and more about what the Government thinks or what the Government should be doing and less and less about our Nation's hopes, our dreams, and our vision of the future.

Ten days ago I had planned to speak to you again about a very important subject -- energy. For the fifth time I would have described the urgency of the problem and laid out a series of legislative recommendations to the Congress. But as I was preparing to speak, I began to ask myself the same question that I now know has been troubling many of you. Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?

It's clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper -- deeper than gasoline lines of energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realize more than ever that as President I need your help. So, I decided to reach out and listen to the voices of America.

I invited to Camp David people from almost every segment of our society business and labor, teachers and preachers, Governors, mayors, and private citizens. And then I left Camp David to listen to other Americans, men and women like you. It has been an extraordinary 10 days, and I want to share with you what I've heard. First of all, I got a lot of personal advice. Let me quote a few of the typical comments that I wrote down.

This from a southern Governor: "Mr. President, you are not leading this Nation -- you're just managing the Government."

"You don't see the people enough any more."

"Some of your Cabinet members don't seem loyal. There is not enough discipline among your disciples."

"Don't talk to us about politics or the mechanics of government, but about an understanding of our common good."

"Mr. President, we're in trouble. Talk to us about blood and sweat and tears."

"If you lead, Mr. President, we will follow."

Many people talked about themselves and about the condition of our Nation. This from a young woman in Pennsylvania: "I feel so far from government. I feel like ordinary people are excluded from political power."

And this from a young Chicano: "Some of us have suffered from recession all our lives."

"Some people have wasted energy, but others haven't had anything to waste."

And this from a religious leader: "No material shortage can touch the important things like God's love for us or our love for one another."

And I like this one particularly from a black woman who happens to be the mayor of a small Mississippi town: "The big-shots are not the only ones who are important. Remember, you can't sell anything on Wall Street unless someone digs it up somewhere else first."

This kind of summarized a lot of other statements: "Mr. President, we are confronted with a moral and a spiritual crisis."

Several of our discussions were on energy, and I have a notebook full of comments and advice. I'll read just a few.

"We can't go on consuming 40 percent more energy than we produce. When we import oil we are also importing inflation plus unemployment."

"We've got to use what we have. The Middle East has only 5 percent of the world's energy, but the United States has 24 percent."

And this is one of the most vivid statements: "Our neck is stretched over the fence and OPEC has a knife."

"There will be other cartels and other shortages. American wisdom and courage right now can set a path to follow in the future."

This was a good one: "Be bold, Mr. President. We may make mistakes, but we are ready to experiment."

And this one from a labor leader got to the heart of it: "The real issue is freedom. We must deal with the energy problem on a war footing."

And the last that I'll read: "When we enter the moral equivalent of war, Mr. President, don't issue us BB guns."

These 10 days confirmed my belief in the decency and the strength and the wisdom of the American people, but it also bore out some of my longstanding concerns about our Nation's underlying problems.

I know, of course, being President, that government actions and legislation can be very important. That's why I've worked hard to put my campaign promises into law -- and I have to admit, with just mixed success. But after listening to the American people I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America. So, I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.

I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our Nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else -- public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We've always believed in something called progress. We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.

Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.

These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Water gate.

We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until 10 years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our Nation's re sources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.

These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.

Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our Nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our Government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.

What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don't like, and neither do I. What can we do?

First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.

One of the visitors to Camp David last week put it this way: "We've got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America."

We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain our unity. We can regain our confidence. We are the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful and awesome than those that challenge us now. Our fathers and mothers were strong men and women who shaped a new society during the Great Depression, who fought world wars, and who carved out a new charter of peace for the world.

We ourselves and the same Americans who just 10 years ago put a man on the Moon. We are the generation that dedicated our society to the pursuit of human rights and equality. And we are the generation that will win the war on the energy problem and in that process rebuild the unity and confidence of America.

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our Nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this Nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our Nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.

In little more than two decades we've gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous tool on our economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline. It's a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our Nation.

The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our Nation. These are facts and we simply must face them.

What I have to say to you now about energy is simple and vitally important.

Point one: I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this Nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 -- never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980's, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade -- a saving of over 4 1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day.

Point two: To ensure that we meet these targets, I will use my Presidential authority to set import quotas. I'm announcing tonight that for 1979 and 1980, I will forbid the entry into this country of one drop of foreign oil more than these goals allow. These quotas will ensure a reduction in imports even below the ambitious levels we set at the recent Tokyo summit.

Point three: To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our Nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the Sun.

I propose the creation of an energy security corporation to lead this effort to replace 2 1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day by 1990. The corporation will issue up to $5 billion in energy bonds, and I especially want them to be in small denominations so that average Americans can invest directly in America's energy security.

Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II, so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war. Moreover, I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this Nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.

These efforts will cost money, a lot of money, and that is why Congress must enact the windfall profits tax without delay. It will be money well spent. Unlike the billions of dollars that we ship to foreign countries to pay for foreign oil, these funds will be paid by Americans to Americans. These funds will go to fight, not to increase, inflation and unemployment.

Point four: I'm asking Congress to mandate, to require as a matter of law, that our Nation's utility companies cut their massive use of oil by 50 percent within the next decade and switch to other fuels, especially coal, our most abundant energy source.

Point five: To make absolutely certain that nothing stands in the way of achieving these goals, I will urge Congress to create an energy mobilization board which, like the War Production Board in World War II, will have the responsibility and authority to cut through the redtape, the delays, and the endless roadblocks to completing key energy projects.

We will protect our environment. But when this Nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.

Point six: I'm proposing a bold conservation program to involve every State, county, and city and every average American in our energy battle. This effort will permit you to build conservation into your homes and your lives at a cost you can afford.

I ask Congress to give me authority for mandatory conservation and for standby gasoline rationing. To further conserve energy, I'm proposing tonight an extra $10 billion over the next decade to strengthen our public transportation systems. And I'm asking you for your good and for your Nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense -- I tell you it is an act of patriotism.

Our Nation must be fair to the poorest among us, so we will increase aid to needy Americans to cope with rising energy prices. We often think of conservation only in terms of sacrifice. In fact, it is the most painless and immediate way of rebuilding our Nation's strength. Every gallon of oil each one of us saves is a new form of production. It gives us more freedom, more confidence, that much more control over our own lives.

So, the solution of our energy crisis can also help us to conquer the crisis of the spirit in our country. It can rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future, and give our Nation and all of us individually a new sense of purpose.

You know we can do it. We have the natural resources. We have more oil in our shale alone than several Saudi Arabias. We have more coal than any nation on Earth. We have the world's highest level of technology. We have the most skilled work force, with innovative genius, and I firmly believe that we have the national will to win this war.

I do not promise you that this struggle for freedom will be easy. I do not promise a quick way out of our Nation's problems, when the truth is that the only way out is an all-out effort. What I do promise you is that I will lead our fight, and I will enforce fairness in our struggle, and I will ensure honesty. And above all, I will act.

We can manage the short-term shortages more effectively and we will, but there are no short-term solutions to our long-range problems. There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice.

Twelve hours from now I will speak again in Kansas City, to expand and to explain further our energy program. Just as the search for solutions to our energy shortages has now led us to a new awareness of our Nation's deeper problems, so our willingness to work for those solutions in energy can strengthen us to attack those deeper problems.

I will continue to travel this country, to hear the people of America. You can help me to develop a national agenda for the 1980's. I will listen and I will act. We will act together. These were the promises I made 3 years ago, and I intend to keep them.

Little by little we can and we must rebuild our confidence. We can spend until we empty our treasuries, and we may summon all the wonders of science. But we can succeed only if we tap our greatest resources -- America's people, America's values, and America's confidence.

I have seen the strength of America in the inexhaustible resources of our people. In the days to come, let us renew that strength in the struggle for an energy-secure nation.

In closing, let me say this: I will do my best, but I will not do it alone. Let your voice be heard. Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country. With God's help and for the sake of our Nation, it is time for us to join hands in America. Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.

Thank you and good night.

How old I am

Was once again reminded of my age and station in life this evening at Dos Caminos, a trendy Mexican boite at 50th and 3rd, for my boy Phil's 41st birthday. It being Thursday, the joint was jumping and was packed with many good looking boys and girls of the 20s-30s variety. Time was, the girls part of that equation would have turned me on, but tonight I found myself grateful to be seated next to a guy from Westchester, with whom I could compare commuting tales and discuss children and the joys of being a "consultant" in such a fucked-up economy (he used to sell structured products for a bank, now is assessing one of the injured bond insurers).

In the bathroom of this joint, some junky sycophant in a monkey suit turned on the tap for you when you turned around from the urinal and tried to spritz your hands from a decorative soap dispenser, all in hopes of getting a tip. If I wanted a servant, I'd live in a frickin emerging market, that's what I say to that.

"Obama assasination"

The spectre of an Obama assassination has become a popular meme. It has become a top 100 search topic, for chrissakes

I first heard the idea mooted by a bunch of young blacks a few weeks ago on the subway. From the black point of view: it's rank defeatism and self-victimization before the fact: "Even if we get a black man in the White House, they just gonna take him away." From a white people's point of view, it's veiled racism: it would be said of any black candidate with a chance as a reason for not voting for them. Al Sharpton, Allan Keyes and Lenora Fulani have never been worth the bullet.

To be sure, Obama is more assassinable than most candidates, and more than most presidents, with the obvious and glaring exception of the present one, whose continued presence amongst the living and breathing really demonstrates better than anything else the degree of inaction and disaffection of the nation over which he has blustered these long eight years.

Malthus and Hobbes, together again

Yesterday I had conversation with a Russian guy wearing a black shirt about the possibility of an Obama presidency. He immediately ran to the scenario of an Obama assassination and the geopolitical risks to which it would expose us. I will comment on the Obama assassination question under separate cover.

This morning I receive an excerpt from the The Guardian, which has gotten its hands on a report by EU Foreign Policy doyenne Javier Solana (what was his old job, head of UN?) predicting that the race for Arctic petrochemical reserves between the USA and Russia will precipitate "security issues for Europe, ranging from energy wars to mass migration, failed states and political radicalization," and that Europe should plan for these things.

I need only turn my head to the right to read a fellow commuter's Wall Street Journal article on Australia's quest for salt-free water. Luckily they're unlikely to start a war over it.

It seems we are in a neo-Malthusian moment which everywhere focuses on scarcity of resources and risk of conflagration, which is rather tricky for those of us with small children, who have come to believe that eschatological scenarios were long since relegated to Bruce Willis movies, 9/11 notwithstanding. Could there be a really big war in our time? Are our international institutions strong enough to resist it? Recent evidence has been mixed, but world war would kinda suck.

On James Wood

James Wood, I seem to recall, has been called the greatest literary critic of our times. I might be in a better position to judge this assertion, if I could bring myself to read through anything he's written. Time and again I pick up his reviews, waiting for the magic to happen, only to be repulsed by his excess of hauteur. Yes yes, he's erudite, but can he cut to the bone? It is true that literary criticism has lost much of its appeal for me since I decided to stop trying to feed my family by doing it. But still. Wood is now the Professor of the Practice of Criticism at Harvard. It would do him well to look past practice and try to get in the game.

For shame

Stephen Soderbergh should be deeply ashamed of himself for making movies like the Ocean's series (Eleven and Thirteen, I guess there was a Twelve in there that somehow slipped past). I mean, there are all the cutest boys on there and I'm sure they make money, but they're utterly meatless and implausible. And if he was going to trumpet that much of Ellen Barkin's breasts he might as well have just broke those bad boys out, that's what I say.

Diet globalization and its discontents

The Sunday NY Times published a longish article on the effects of diet globalization, specifically how global growth and biofuel production is driving a demand for wheat and other grains that is difficult to slake. Midwestern farmers are doing well, but the price of bread has risen everywhere, with a big impact on places like Nigeria, where bread is relatively new.

What's difficult to unpack here is how the notional impact of globalization (people coming to believe they should be able to live in a certain way) intersects with the economic realities of scarce resources. Despite (or perhaps because) bread is a relatively new arrival in Nigeria, a Lagos merchant says "I must eat bread and tea in the morning. Otherwise I can't be happy." At a time when first-world consumers are obsessing about the carbon footprint of their food purchases, the emerging world bourgeoisie predicates its sense of self on the presence of commodities from across the world, the environmental externalities of which are quite suspect.

It's just the same as the Chinese and Indian merchant classes wanting cars, needing to replicate the standards of living of the West, but with food.

And it's not like we in the West have given up much either, though the raw economics of the upcoming downturn may help us along.

All in all, it returns me to my longstanding point about Green Baywatch cultural diplomacy: the developing world gets its notion of what a lifestyle should be from us, so we should use mass media to disseminate an idea of what a sustainable lifestyle might look like. The problem is, however, that if America's place in the world has been inexorably reduced courtesy of Iraq, the rise of China and India, and a lengthy credit-driven downturn, nobody will listen to us anymore. And if our ability to produce world-dominating piece of shit soap operas like Dallas and Baywatch has been eroded by the rise of reality TV domestically and cheaper Latin American telenovelas internationally, we can't even find the world's ear.

Up and down

There is an escalator in the place where I work on Wall St that goes between a lobby and a cafeteria. I have never before seen an escalator where such a high percentage of the population walks up and down to speed their path without being forced by a crowd -- like in a train station. Whether this is because they are very busy, because they feel aligned with the firm's mission, or because they fear being observed not bustling in this most public of places, it's impossible to say. In some real sense it doesn't matter. It is part of the culture of this space.

Daybreak

It makes a huge difference to the psyche of the commuter when the sun starts coming out in time to see us to out the door. Nothing is worse than days spent in conference calls and darkness.

Automatic e-bill payment and other wonders

With the advent of automatic e-bill payment and universalized direct deposit, money is being reduced more and more even at the retail level to its purest state, trust. I get pre-tax money for parking subtracted from my paycheck and payed to my parking vendor. As more and more cyclical transactions get automated, we'll be increasingly able to access services just by instantiating relationships, without having to deal with physical tokens like cash, checks, or cards even. So what you have to guard most zealously is your SSN and your PIN, lest someone become you. It's wacky when you think about it.

Oh yeah, Natalie still wants a cat.

Book ithe movie

Idea for a movie: the book is better than the movie. The whole art/reality theme has been played out many times, most recently in the Will Ferrell / Emma Thompson / Latifah Stranger Than Fiction (totally based on an Unamuno novel that we read in frickin high school). But nobody has ever thematized the idea of the book being better than the movie. Probably Spike Jonze is the man for the job.

Imagine a bunch of characters living out their lives only to discover not only that they're living in a movie, but that the movie pales beside the book. Imagine how depressing! Hilarious hijinks ensue. It has the makings of a box office barnburner.

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In other news, what's better than a movie -- a video of a political speech. In this case our guy Josh Stein bringin truth to the stompin 16th.

Times on teenage male sexualtiy

In the Sunday Times a week or so back there was an article about how a survey on teenage boys showed that, contrary to pop cultural representations, aren't really all about getting some, but in fact are very interested in relationships. I know that was true for me. As a teenager I always went out with girls I could get because the only thing scarier than sex was being rejected by the girls I actually wanted. OK, the one. There was one sure way not to fail in that regard, and that was to not even try.

And I really don't think that Hollywood is really all that far off from the truth. I mean, sure, there are pure genre pics that depict boys as mindless pussy hounds, but many of them, including Superbad and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, cling to a more sentimental and indeed perhaps more realistic vision of boys as psychically delicate little things who drink to get their balls rolling.

Here's one from Scientist.

Independence Day

Without even being a Slavist, the polymathic Jane Ellen Harrison coined a term which has stuck in the Russian Literature community. Following on the model of the imperfective aspect shared by all Russian verbs, which describes processes as they transpire, never as complete actions, Harrison bore down on the "imperfective tendency" of the Russian novel, in which nothing ever seems to happen, as opposed to the plot-driven modalities of Dickens, Balzac and their heirs.

When I started in on Richard Ford's Independence Day, Pulitzer-Prize winning and all, I initially fell in love. Here's a late-stage midlife crisis Princeton dweller (a superfluous man, to grab another term from the Russ Lit arsenal), a guy with keen eye for human character, the telling detail, and a penchant for theoretical and introspective ramblings, trying to make peace with where he's at.

But now, some 200 pages into the thing, this imperfective tendency is waying me down: our hero is very much at somewhere, and needs to move the fuck on with it. The fact that he knows it doesn't help much. However short the time frame, the reader demands something, some move forward. I myself can drive around New Jersey and Connecticut, stop at rest stops and motels, observe people. I don't need a novel for that.

Tour de puke

The stomach bug has visited our household with a vengeance. First Natalie fell victim, now Graham, whining, weak, asleep on the couch as I type. Since I'm gone all day, I hear only the epic tales of ginger ale and saltines and videos and woe.

With Natalie, though, I was reminded of the sick days of my youth, of the warm feeling when your parents pay more attention to you and don't bark. OK. Time to carry Graham upstairs so we can watch yet another comedy about the mob and eat Thai takeout.

Moment of truth

There is a moment, after lunch many days, when all of a sudden I remember that, in my haste to consume and my focus on whatever I was reading, that I might have left traces of a condiment on my shirt. At this time, I stealthily look around me to check that no one is looking, and then I scan the front of my shirt for the telltale traces of ketchup or perhaps soy sauce. Relief or agony sets in.

One smart guy

Mark Hulbert, in his column in the Times this Sunday, details a theory advanced by one Owen Lamont, ex-of the Yale Econ department and now with some think thank and a hedge fund too. I have no doubt that Lamont's theory probably holds water, is carefully considered and reflects its champion's considerable intelligence. Nor, indeed, did Lamont evince any doubt as to his intelligence when I met him at a hedge fund industry do in Greenwich.

When it was time for Lamont -- this professed behavioral economist -- to take the podium and address a couple hundred investor types, a key theme was how quantitative tools and behavioral insight gave hedge funds and Wall Street generally an edge over "the dumb money," which is to say retail investors, which is to say me. Now, all businesses want to take as much of their clients' money as they can by providing a certain level of service, but this was as cynical an attitude as I've heard taken. We may only hope that Lamont's insights will be leveraged by the even smarter money on the Street without getting him paid.

Eastern Promises

This David Cronenberg movie with Vigo Mortensen and Naomi Watts is not worth renting, though thankfully it is short. A bunch of cliches about the Russian mob, some bad guttural mother tongue, and a threadbare plot. For the ladies, however, there is chance to see Mortensen's butt and some fleeting glimpses of his penis. Good stuff.

Dan Zanes in concert

Natalie and Graham and I shelled out actual dollars to see Dan Zanes at the McCarter theater today. The scruffy old guy put on a good show, there with his post-racial gender-balanced Spanish-speaking band, he is clearly the class of children's performers.

Graham had a good time, pounding on my arm with his fist to show excitement. Natalie liked some of the songs, though much of the time she suffered through non-recognition of the tunes. Mostly, however, she was too old for it. Not that the music itself does not appeal to her, it's just that she observed that the core demographic was 3-5 year olds, and therefore inferred that she was out of place.

Who, then is the Dan Zanes of kids like Natalie, the pre-Tweens? Who makes music that appeals to them but that parents can like too? Or is that a contradiction in terms, as the 7-9 set begins to mark out its own independence from the parents. Could it be the Beatles? Note to self, get Help! and Hard Day's Night from Netflix.

Real writer snobbery

My friend Joe acts like blogs are not even writing. In today's case, I have to say, he's right.

The Retail Stomach

It would be interesting to know what the statistics are on retail investor trading these days. The markets may seem volatile these days, with the occasional intraday 200 point swing (cf today), but I don't think they really are, relative to the 300-400 point days we saw back in 2001-3.

For myself, I view the markets with much greater equanimity than I did then. Part of it is I've been actually gainfully employed much longer, but part of it is I'm used to watching them, and have lived through a previous downturn, when, yes, I did a little panic selling.

And how representative am I? Certainly the great cattle drive into mutual funds and then equities and other stuff came after the introduction of the 401k from 1978 forward, and people really got drawn into the markets during the tech boom. So there are millions and millions of people out there who first got into the markets in the last decade or two, but have now ridden a cycle. And it may be a new generation of heroic buy and holder / dollar cost averagers that are tamping volatility like a strong dose of investment lithium.

Of course, those with real foresight exited stocks and started flipping condos. Mhmm.

Running

In the New York area -- especially at the end of the day -- you can always tell the dads apart from other commuters. They are the ones running, bags in hand, coats flapping in the wind, grunting to make the train, to get to their cars first to beat the crush out of the parking lot, because the ten minutes associated with waiting for a light twice could be 50% of the time you might have with a kid.

Women by and large don't do this. Perhaps because of their shoes. The childless are undermotivated.

Apologies if the blog is rather commute focused. Can't blog about work, daren't about marriage, and lunch is a commodity.

Perhaps I'll find some chestnuts soon in our bathroom renovation.

Now must go wash hair in sink.

6:14 AM, NE Corridor inbound express train

Sat next to a 60ish black woman clad entirely in black, her head wrapped in a shawl and turned towards the window so that I couldn't see her face. She was reading from a dog-eared mini-bible in a raspy whisper. It was all straight out of the Exorcist or something, and I half expected that she was going to turn to me and shoot daggers of fire out of her eyes and through my skull, so that I would rue not having taken one of those rear-facing seats next to some obese guy.

Instead, she got off in Newark.

The independent

Today at Maggie's, as Granny and Natalie were getting ready to head home just as David announced he was taking Maxie and some other boy to the firehouse, Graham took three mighty strides towards independence by walking over to David, taking his hand, and declaring his intention to go with him to see the trucks. Graham, you see, had never gone anywhere without some blood kin in tow.

And, indeed, reports came back that a fine time was had by all, including much climbing.

The 2/3 Southbound, 96th St, 11:30 pm

On boarding the train am confronted by that rarest of spectacles, an open subway conversation between people who don't know each other. Four black teens/twentysomethings on one side (one girl leaning on a guy in a bomber jacked, another girl with legs draped over the first), an old redboned Bible thumper and a New Lefty Upper West Side Jewish intellectual on the other.

The black guy in a bomber says bemusedly: "Yeah, a black man for President, it might really happen this time..."
Leaning girl 1: "Not like with that other guy, was it Jesse Owens?"
New Lefty: "Jesse Jackson"
Leaning girl 1: "Yeah, they didn't let him be in the main election. And it's the first time they got a woman running for real too."
New Lefty: "Actually, Lenora Fulani has been running for years, and she's a black woman."
Leaning girl 2: "Really? I ain't never heard of her."

And so it went for a while, Mr. New Lefty dispensing facts in a genial and avuncular way, and all the black younguns just generally in a fine mood because there was hope a black man might make it to the White House, or maybe a woman, but in any case maybe just maybe not another white man.

And frankly, it's all good. Watching these kids beam gave the impression that a black man in the White House in and of itself might inject the African-American community with so much pride that in and of itself it might instill large numbers with the confidence and direction they might need to better their lives.

Or else we could have Hilary.

In transit

Got onto the subway at Wall St yesterday in evening rush and was confronted by the unlikely spectacle of an filthy homeless man crunching away at a big plate of crab. I kid you not.

Later, as New Jersey Transit approached Princeton, my eye alighted upon a certain Andrew Shue, ontime Billy of Melrose Place and MLS striker, known to share a house in the tony Western Section with sister and Sharon Stone wannabe Elizabeth. Celebrity sitings may be rare, but it serves as a small reminder that there ain't no first class on New Jersey Transit.

Tree street rap

I guess its rap week here at the Grouse. Today we're featuring a video from the kid across the block, who goes by the name of Rum tmpcha and whose real name we will leave out for privacy reasons. Our house and car are among many featured. What I will disclose is that his dad's dad was a colleague of Mary's dad at old Natwest in the City, back in the day. Naumsayin? Iss all in da hizood.

Back to the source

You Tube is the gift that keeps on giving. For those of you who go this far back, this is where it all started (at least for southern white kids). Think Purdy's, 1979.

The Fatback band


Sugarhill Gang


Kurtis Blow

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five

About a cat

Natalie is very close to getting a cat or two, but we're not going to let on for a while. We have a little kitty scorecard in place and will give her a chance to earn a cat by getting more pluses than minuses.

For me, frankly, I think she has earned one just by saying that she is going to quit baton. I have communicated my feelings about baton in the past, and though my mom - as a former twirler herself - may object, I never saw my daughter doing that for long. I want her to play ultimate.

But, for today, we have conceptual agreement amongst spouses that a feline may soon be forthcoming, and that's enough. Could it be that her heart will be fulfilled in its wish for a Turkish Van, the swimming cat? Doubt it.

Waiting for Iacocca

Interest rate cuts we got, and a cash bolus is on the way, particularly for us breeders, but who will make us feel good about America? Obama can help us feel good civically, but economically we're gonna need a cheerleader, somebody to play the same role Iacocca played back in the eighties. Rarah we can do it. But from what sector will this person arise? Probably not from Detroit. Neither Wall Street and Silicon Valley has really ever spoken to the heartland. A 2.0 person would make sense, and Mark Zuckerberg's taking a smart risk with open architecture could give him an opening, but I don't see it. Plus the fact that, like Gates, he got his prize jewel shiftily. Bentonville is discredited.

If Vanguard had a dynamic new product and a strong successor to Bogle, that's someone who could lead. Index investing, after all, is faith-based, and America needs its faith restored, yet again.



While we're on the subject of 80s cheerleading and optimism, he're the old Morning in America spot, as clever a piece of propaganda as you're likely to see.

Bring out your dead!

I mentioned that I had recently snagged a copy of the Holy Grail, but did not mention the fact that Graham took an interest in the box and wanted to watch it. OK, I thought, lets do it.

So the initial seen about the velocity of sparrows carrying coconuts etc. was lost on him, as you can imagine, but then it cuts directly to the scene where a cart of corpses is being pulled through filthy muddy medieval streets by Eric Idle, who cries "Bring out your dead!" Hmm, I'm thinking, does Graham get this? Sure enough, by the time John Cleese brings out the old dude who says "I'm not quite dead yet" Graham tells me to stop it, "this is too scary." I put on the Garbage Trucks video and calm was restored....

Cut to pre-school, the next week (this is as recounted to Mary by Graham's teacher). Graham's class is being shown some knights of some sort, and Graham gets all excited and launches into a torrent of verbalization. The teacher doesn't really catch any of it, until the end, when Graham says: "Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!", and she realized that he was quoting from the Grail. In this case, the apple truly does not fall far from the tree.

Little tricks

I used to wonder how it was the very well-dressed corporate folk could be getting reception on their Blackberries on the subway and staying so focused and productive and brow-furrowed. Now that I have one of my own, I know the answer: they don't! They're scrolling through files already loaded onto their devices and tapping out messages that will be sent out when the little devils breath the fresh fresh air of connectivity again. And now I too can put on subway airs with my shiny little hand-held.*






*Please place all penis enlargement jokes in comments below.

Not with a bang

Last night I hustled to catch the 5:16 back to Princeton, having missed seeing my kids 2 nights out of 3. Scheduled to arrive at 6:12 or something, it came in at 7:05 because a broken down train next to the platform Hamilton made everything run on the middle tracks.* This morning, the 7:03 express into Manhattan – already running one car short – made an unscheduled stop at Metro Park and picked up a mess of people, arriving 8 minutes late to Penn Station.

What does the decline of an empire look like? Those of us who were around in the 70s have some recollection of this foreboding. I remember as well being in Britain in the early 80s, after a band as morbid as Joy Division briefly topped the charts, and I can tell you nobody had a clue what was gonna happen next.

After storms ravaged the towpaths along the Pennsylvania side canals along the Delaware River, the state of Pennsylvania hasn’t laid out dollars to fix them, rendering great 90s-era public parkland almost useless. NJ Transit is, obviously, having serious problems making things run on time. New Jersey is facing a massive pension funding deficit and Corzine is floating a plan to privatize the toll highways, which would jack up tolls. A bridge collapses in Twin Cities. Felix Rohatyn is trying to make the decay of public infrastructure a national priority, which is difficult in the context of a short-term spend spend spend stimulus package because it's too indirect.

Over time, the decline of our public finances will manifest itself in the degradation of public infrastructure and services, which will in turn negatively impact peoples’ ability to consume. Which, from a sustainability perspective, is perhaps good.

Addendum: For no good reason, the 5:43 express from New York this evening arrived 1 minute before it was supposed to leave, five cars short. It was packed, hot and miserable. It got to Princeton 16 minutes late. No explanation was offered.

Difficulty

We recently watched Ken Loach'sThe Wind that Shakes the Barley , and it had many of the virtues and shortcomings that I remembered of Loach, didactic and heartfelt, this one beautiful and green. In it an IRA guy has to execute a guy from his crew for treason, shoot him in the head, and as the condemned boy converses with his executor his last words are "I'm scared Damian," and Damian replies "I'll protect you." And shoots him.

It's a very hard seen to watch, and there are others too. Gut wrenching.

And it brought me back to the question of difficulty in art. As time rolls on I'm less and less inclined towards it, more often picking the Will Ferrell or Ben Stiller vehicle. The certainty of my own death now being more apparent, there's more of a need to skirt it.

But it's worth challenging myself still, I think. This new wave of Rumanian films (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu et al.), is the clearest demonstration of it. There are places where life is still lived otherwise.

Off the rack, 1.25

So after losing my expensive glasses in the bottomless troth of humanity that is Penn Station, I headed out to an optician within my new vision insurance plan to reequip myself. When I got there, it was crowded and I had to fill out paperwork, and there was some guy in back looked like a Capo or something kicking back doing Sudoku or somesuch. When I got my paperwork done, it turned out he was the optometrist.

He took me in the examination room and asks me a few questions about my age, my vision, and says that he's going to examine me but he can tell me right then that I don't need a prescription and can buy reading glasses off the rack. Then, he examined me and told me I could buy off the rack, and that I didn't need a prescription.

"But the other optometrist (one of the guys at Lenscrafters at Market Fair) told me my eyes were different, and therefore I needed a prescription." And he's like "Tell me this. What's the difference between Plainsboro and West Windsor." Me: "A couple of miles?" Him: "No. They're the same thing, that's how different your eyes are. The other guy (that is, the guy at Lenscrafters at Market Fair) just wanted to sell you some glasses."

I felt just like Navin R. Johnson: "I see, it's a profit scheme!"

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.