Crudities

For some reason I thought back to Knocked Up recently. It seems to me that those slacker dudes sitting around the living room making sperm jokes marks a new level of crassness in movies, though I was less shocked when I saw on The Soup's review of reality shows on E that on some show they had real families competing to suck the cream out of cannolis and spit them into bowls.

Naturally, my mind flashed back to Bakhtin's 1965 book on Rabelais where he extolled the as liberating political forces of Carnival and "the lower bodily strata" and satire in the Renaissance, and to Makaveyev's shitting contest in the 1974 classic Sweet Movie. But I don't think that fart and cum jokes are as liberating when they're part of everyday, everyminute life. I think they work their magic as exceptions.

Is it just me getting old, or are there new levels of lowness? Compare Animal House, a standard-bearer for its day, now looks chaste. Is crassness cyclical? (seemed like all the college students were into ballroom dance and frickin volleyball in the 90s.)

Couldn't find the shitting contest. Here's another fine scene from Sweet Movie

pre-dusk

It's late in the day, Mary and Natalie have swum out to the dock, the one with a short and crappy ladder which is hard to climb onto. The whole family -- even Graham -- have just had spins in the kayak. We kept Graham in the creek but I went out into the lake and was hard-pressed not to paddle over to the house of grocery-store impresario Danny Wegman (who has built a magnificent barn up the hill across the street to house god knows what kind of toys), but I held myself back to save energy for tennis at dusk, having put 20-odd hilly miles on the bike before lunch. Graham and I just had a snack: bananas, chips, lemonade.

RIM job

So here I am by the lake in Canandaigua, watching big power boats blow past noisily as I wonder how the vendors of these discretionary internal combustion nuisances will earn a living after multiple years of four dollar gas -- and the answer is: I don't care. What may be interesting is how the market for junk auto parts and scrap steel could be reshaped by SUVs disappearing from the roads.

Anyhow, all of this comes to you courtesy of my little hand held device (insert pun here) from our friends at Research in Motion.

On the road again

Once more, we are transformed into Griswolds and head off into the wilds of upstate New York, to Lake Canandaigua, a region so wild the Google hasn't even bothered to acquire satellite imagery. I will post as I can from up there and have already scheduled one mid-week post, but if you don't hear from me, it's not because I don't care, it's because we're jumping in the lake and looking 10 miles down it at the mountains converging at its South end. I like.

Commitment

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Wall Street analysts today that Microsoft is "committed to the internet." Which strikes me as wise, because it seems to me that this internet thing is going to be huge.

Here's a little something from back in the day. It runs long, but it's worth watching at least through the part about the cinnamon toast.

SCTV -- Roy's Food Repair

Idling

Often when I watch cops, limo drivers, contractors, and all manner of citizens idling in their vehicles for no good purpose and spewing useless emissions into the ether, I think to myself: there really ought to be a law about this. Especially for cops.

And, thanks to the miracle of the so-called "internet", I find that already in 2006 there were a number of state and local laws on idling. Below is the statute from Princeton Township, New Jersey (there is none for Princeton Borough, where I live, nor are there any in the whole state of North Carolina). Note below that cops are not exempted. But if you bust them, they'll hassle you. What are you gonna do?

Sec. 11-31.9 Idling of gasoline fueled motor vehicles on township streets.
Pursuant to N.J.A.C. 7:27-14.3, no person may cause, suffer allow or permit the engine of a gasoline fueled motor vehicle to idle for more than three consecutive minutes on streets within the Township of Princeton if the vehicle is not in motion with the following exceptions:
(a) The above provisions shall not apply to:
(1) Autobuses while discharging or picking up passengers;
(2) Motor vehicles stopped in a line of traffic;
(3) Motor vehicles whose primary and/or secondary power source is utilized in whole or in part for necessary and definitively prescribed mechanical operation other than propulsion, passenger compartment heating or air conditions;
(4) Motor vehicles being or waiting to be examined by state or federal motor vehicle inspectors;
(5) Emergency motor vehicles in an emergency situation;
(6) Motor vehicles while being repaired;
(7) Motor vehicles while engaged in the process of connection, detachment or exchange of trailers; or
(8) Motor vehicles manufactured with a sleeper berth while being used in a nonresidentially zoned area by the vehicle’s operator for sleeping or resting.
(Ord. No. 2004-9, § 2.)

Three more days to vacation

Could not be more psyched to throw the family in the car and head up to fabulous upstate New York. Have not been anywhere for a long time. It would probably be too depressing to really think about that. And Canandaigua barely counts as anywhere, since that's part of our normal circuit too.

Pool time

It was mighty hot in New Jersey this weekend, time for some pool time. After Graham took an initial foray into the big pool at Community Park in Mary's arms last weekend, I took him back to the pool solo this one. This time, he didn't even want to start out in the baby pool, we went straight to the big pool where he twirled around in my arms, hung out on the steps (coming down to his neck) and even "jumped" from the side. And he also let me dump water on his head with a baseball cap (a huge step). Then on Sunday at Broadmead he was similarly daring, even hanging out in an inner-tube by the steps and dipping the front of his head in the water, protected by his new goggles.

This on top of the fact that he's been sleeping through the night in underwear and letting me cut his hair some now and again. Coming along, he is.

How hard does YouTube rock

Here's a chestnut from Emir Kusturica's very early "Do you remember Dolly Bell?"

The guy is singing "How hard it is for me in Sarajevo," over and over again. Imagine if that was your uncle. You'd probably want to go wrestle on stones too.

Blowing of mind

I've heard about Dubai in passing but I've never really dug into it. Then I looked through this to get a little perspective. Scroll down to the pictures and read the captions. I'm not really one for excess, and I don't feel a strong need for desert heat, but the shear scale of everything makes a certain impression. It's hard not to want to go and gaze slack-jawed at the sheer scale of everything.

Of course, if I want to go somewhere to make myself feel poor, I can just hop on a train and go to Manhattan. Or, indeed, hop on my bike and ride into Princeton's "Western Section," sprinkled with more fancy private schools than you'd think they could find rich kids to fill. But Dubai is pretty over the top. Soon we may be all commuting to there using some sort of molecular dust reconstitutor like they had back in the sixties... as in this rare historical footage from back in the year of my birth, 1966:

Safe haven

My mind keeps running back to the $3 trillion in bank deposit growth. Flight to quality indeed, if the banks are gonna throw money at any mortgage that moves.

Meanwhile, where are the mutual fund blow-ups? Except for a few hiccups with money market funds exposed to too much auction-rate garbage, mutual funds have been pretty quiet.

A quick glance at inflows (at AMGdata) shows that trust in the both mutual funds and ETFs is still pretty high: Q2 had $70 bln flowing into stock and bond mutual funds and $56bln into ETFs. That's annualized long-only inflows of half a trillion, which doesn't sound horrible, without digging into historical context.

All in all it goes to show you, you may overpay for beta with actively managed funds, but it's better than overpaying for leveraged idiocy. The corporate governance overhead associated with mutual funds may in fact work for investors.

Superclasico!

For those amongst my readers hailing from the Piedmont region and believing that the Carolina-Duke game is pretty much it as far as sports rivalries go, may I recommend that you tune in to the Fox Soccer Channel (thanks Mike and Brendan for your sponsorship) and check out the series of "Superclasico" match ups between the Buenos Aires cross-town rivals Boca Juniors and River Plate. This is cash money. These people care about their teams, and it's good soccer.

BTW: From a blimp view of the stadium spied a parking lot, couldn't have held 800 cars. Google maps confirmed that this was the only dedicated parking for the stadium, which must seat 70-80,000. Think about getting all those people out of there. They must have to stack subway trains up at stations outside the stadium. It could take hours to clear the neighborhood. It would be a good place to own a cafe, if not a bar.

Return of the scarcely repressed

"I am tired of Goldman being viewed as the Prince of the street. They are cunning and manipulative. I hope that the SEC discovers their deceptive practices and finally mars their squeaky clean image that they try to portray."

Seeing this quote from one who calls himself "Bond33" on Marketwatch today took me way, way back, back to Slavoj Zhizhek's first English book The Sublime Object of Ideology. Zhizhek talks about a perverse logic of anti-semitism. Here's the archetypal conversation:

Villager 1: "That Jew trader Jakov is so shifty and deceiptful."
Villager 2: "What? He seems so honest and trustworthy"
Villager 1: "Exactly. He fools everyone."

Now, I wouldn't say Goldman is above always above reproach in all regards, but Bond33 is striking a classically anti-semitic tone. But hey, isn't that what anonymous web publishing is all about?

Bank deposit growth

Here's a pretty astonishing statistic from our friend Felix Salmon. Bank deposits are up $3 trillion. If we assume that's primarily corporate and High Net Worth money (given the negative savings rate for the general population), it signals a substantial risk aversion over the entire period, given that they're not in equities or bonds or something even fishier.

But, oh wait, they are in something fishier. They've got uninsured deposits in institutions punch drunk on vaporous underwriting and shareware risk management. You would think all those deposits would make for "capital adequacy." Guess not.

Cognitive dissonance

Another minor celebrity sighting on the NE Corridor train today as I spotted Kwame Anthony Appiah of the Princeton Philosophy Department reading (get this) USA Today. Perhaps he was doing some research of a sort, having found a discared copy on his seat, much like the Grouse is known to read Newsday or the Post. But that's only at the end of the day when the brain is fried.

Jim Jones, meet E.D.Hirsch

"I have a very bitter taste in my mouth from the 2004 Olympics, as if I just ate a sour grapefruit or something. This summer in Beijing, we’re going to drink a lot of Kool-Aid, because revenge is going to be sweet."

This is from Carmelo Anthony's initial entry in his blog on the New York Times for Beijing. Blogging is all good and well, but when both writer and host site are major commercial enterprises, it would be good to employ editors, because one year of education at Syracuse does not apparently protect one from the old foot in the mouth syndrome. After all, in common parlance, Anthony just told us that the US basketball team will be deluded into committing mass suicide, Guyana-style. He apparently has heard the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid," he just didn't get it.

One way American Funds suck

My current employer uses American Funds as its 401k provider. So I went to AmericanFunds.com to figure out how to get myself a login, and clicked on "Employer-Sponsored Plans" and then "Your Account," which landed me at https://www.americanfunds.com/account/login.htm, where I tried to set up an account and couldn't. I finally called an 800 number and after a while the woman tells me that I should be going to a different web site altogether, over at http://pr.retire.americanfunds.com/home.htm. When I went there I signed up and saw my account, etc. All good.

Now Institutional Investor ranks American Funds' parent company, the 3rd biggest Asset Manager in America with $1.55 trillion under management, after Barclay's and State Street but ahead of Fidelity and Vanguard, and I'm pretty sure that on the straight mutual fund side American is in the pole position. I don't know where they are in terms of 401k assets, but I can tell you they're not doing themselves a favor with their navigation. And they should synch up their color schemes too! Any old Estonian phishing scheme would do better matching look and feel across the site.

It's hard to stay at the top of the asset management ranks. Fidelity was up top for a while, then Magellan and Contrafund faltered and it fell back. Will American Funds be the next to regress to the mean? Stay tuned.

Washer and dryer

An older black man gets on the train in Edison. Hawaian shirt, white straw hat and cane. Tells friend on the phone of his excitement at getting an apartment for $1155 (on pretax income of $2600) and tells her with great and genuine feeling that it has a washer and dryer. I mean, he was deeply moved, as if he had spent many years going to the laundromat.

Meanwhile, an attractive hispanic woman across the way getting who is getting a degree in fashion merchandising with an focus on footware gets a suitable interview on her cell phone. She was also pretty stoked.

So the economy keeps chugging along, and little by little some people figure things out.

Orhan Pamuk -- Snow, done

It took me a long time to push my way through this novel. Pamuk is at times a little too enamored of doing everything through dialog. But at the end of the day, this is a special book, and I will read more of the guy.

At times, the dense interactions of the love interests of the disparate characters Ka, Ipek, Blue, Kadife, Fazil, Necip, etc., could only remind the attentive reader of my dissertation. And, indeed, Turgunev is invoked at the beginning and the end. Dostoevskii is almost more present, particularly Bakhtin's notion of the dialogic Dostoevskii in which all the characters has full-fledged visions which fight with the narrator. But, in the end, none of Pamuk's characters' visions really cohere for long, they just chrystallize, pass downwards, and melt elegantly away in the rearview.

A Cross of Oil

By some fluke, I started thinking about parallels between William Jennings Bryan's populism as expressed in the famed "Cross of Gold" speech from the 1896 Democratic Convention and the current situation with oil. Not that I really remembered much about the circumstances except that it was classic populism. Turns, out, the speech was given on 112 days ago today, July 9th. Frickin spooky, eh?

Anyhow, there were some parallels. Seems the heartland was hurting after 23 years of deflation and regular guys couldn't service debt because the dollar was on a gold standard, so they were advocating for "bimetallism," letting dollars be backed by silver too and thereby expanding M2 or M3 or whatever we'd call it today. And the Wall St interests were not down with this plan, as they'd end up with silver instead of gold, which was all you could used for foreign trade.

So Bryan broke out some rhetorical strategies which remain popular amongst politicians of all parties when playing demagogue:

We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis; the merchant at the cross-roads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day—who begins in the spring and toils all summer—and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain; the miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth, or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs, and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade are as much business men as the few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world. We come to speak of this broader class of business men.

Ah, my friends, we say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic coast, but the hardy pioneers who have braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—the pioneers away out there [pointing to the West], who rear their children near to Nature's heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their young, churches where they praise their Creator, and cemeteries where rest the ashes of their dead—these people, we say, are as deserving of the consideration of our party as any people in this country. It is for these that we speak. We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest; we are fighting in the defence of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!

...(the punchline) Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Before long, somebody's going to actually break this toolkit out to talk about a cross of oil, which won't let the working man drive his F150 to the 7-11 for Marlboros and a 64oz Slurpee. John Edwards would already be there if he were still in business.

Get this man a new job

Henry Paulson, apparently not satisfied with his current position as Secretary of the Treasury, would seem to be advocating for a new job with the ever bubble-bedazzled National Association of Realtors with his statements today on the housing market. Quoth Marketwatch:

...Paulson said in a speech to an FDIC conference on low-income workers access to the mortgage markets. Paulson said that home prices typically include foreclosure sales, which usually occur at a discount. In some cities, foreclosure sales have spiked. For instance, foreclosure sales in March were 29% of sales in Los Angeles, Paulson said. Existing home sales appear to have flattened...

You have to love this logic: the sales occur at a discount, so they don't count. Put another way, sales statistics should only incorporate sales that occur at their stated or correct price, or they will drag the numbers down. This is the kind of sound judgment we really want to hear from our seniormost financial officials.

Or perhaps he said this to make Bush's statements sound rational and intelligent by contrast. That's called taking one for the team.

Molokanka

The year was 1994, and a rare confluence of fellowship money sent me on a plane to St. Petersburg, one time capital of Russia, for some extended language training to get me ready to teach that strange tongue and also to work on a paper to deliver in Kazan', out on the Volga, later that summer.

But anyhow, it was summer, and I was still single, and our teacher Natasha was quite charming and not evidently much older than me, so I applied my wiles to the task of charming her. And it all seemed to go well after a few class break time cigarettes and witty repartee. Turns out that despite her blonde hair she is from Baku, Azerbaijan, and is a molokanka, which is to say descended from an anarchic sect banished to the outskirts of the empire back in the day.

So she agrees to meet me one Sunday afternoon to go park strolling and coffee sipping and the like, and then she shows up with a friend (a total sneak). And we galavant about, getting further acquainted, and then we stop on some park bench to smoke and sip on something, and I whip out this cheap lighter, and I must have been fiddling with the gas control in my pocket because when I went to light Natasha's cigarette, it totally nicked her bangs and singed an eyebrow pretty good too. That nasty burning hair smell was everywhere.

All was not lost, but it was did not enhance anything.

Knocked Up

This is not a great movie, not even a good one, but there are moments of comic brilliance and a pretty great birthing scene.

This scene is typical. You have to fight through some stupid shit to get to real laughs.

The times they are a changin

You know something's afoot when Robert Reich is up on CNBC in a jacket, black t-shirt, and beard (OK, he's always got that to make himself look taller).

Where did all the dumb money go?

Maybe it’s just me, but at times like this it’s hard to figure out what all the “talent” on Wall St is supposed to be doing. The theory is you take a bunch of really smart people, pay them well, make them mingle and share ideas, work them to death, and they should produce value. Thing is, you look at the markets for the last eight years, the second half of arguably the most booya period for both retail and institutional participation in financial markets ever, and you’re not seeing value add. You probably need to go back 9 years for inflation-adjusted market cap parity.

So all the inflows of this period (like my 401k contributions, for example) have outflowed elsewhere. I have heard this called "dumb money" on the Street.

Controlling for the optical illusion of CNBC and Kramer -- looks as much like the doldrums of 1973-1982 as it does like 1991-2000.* One key difference is that the manses of Greenwich are themselves no optical illusion (would that they were), and that the concentration of wealth they attest to also is not, though my mind runs to such houses as Biltmore, the Tsarist palaces, the Mansion walk in Newport, RI. There’s a historical pattern of excess wealth concentration resulting in unsustainable residences that and have to be turned into museums which themselves cannot break even. Look at the deed restriction on Doris Duke’s estate near Somerville, NJ, which says the house cannot have tours go on. So they move plants inside the rooms and call it an “interior garden tour” to strip twenties off the unsuspecting Martha Steward wannabes just so they have money to mow the grass and run the AC. So even such obscene concentrations of “value” don’t work over time, as first the value dissipates, then the thing itself. Where, then, should Steven Cohen stick his basketball court? I have some ideas.

*One bellwether distinction between the 70s and now is Felix Rohatyn’s activities. Then he needed to swoop in transactionally and save New York City. Today he’s thinking more long-term about rebuilding roads, bridges and the like. I think that shows a little learning.

Fireworks

Tonight Princeton held its annual fireworks display at the baseball field, only this time it was attended by hordes -- maybe 3 times the normal number. It was also Graham's first time at the fireworks, and he did dig it, ooohing and aaahing like a seasoned pro. So there we were with everybody from Steve and Janet's gathering, lying on the blanket looking up, a gaggle of children clustered together but on the edge was Natalie, leaning against my leg, and on my other side Graham, leaning often against Mary but with his feet against me. And I could reach out and touch Mary's back, and I realized that for the first time in a long time I was touching all the members of my family at the same time. And it was nice.

Traffic patterns

The Grouse's traffic numbers are burgeoning (in relative terms) with what I term "organic" traffic, people just coming to the site. We got our regulars checking in first thing in the morning(good morning to you), and a fair amount of traffic that comes in through search engines looking for (as you can well imagine) all kinds of random shit. With 1200 plus posts, by now I have a little something for -- if not everybody, then a healthy plurality of the web-surfing populace. It's a diversified product strategy, like an internet convenience store with your slurpees over here, motor oil over there, and a key to the bathroom if you ask nicely.

Japanese tennis mom

Out on the tennis court at the high school yesterday evening, a couple of young tennis bucks were practicing their serves. Whack whack whack. Then one of them took off, and the other one's mom showed up. He kept on serving, and from his mom yelling to him in Japanese inferred that he was nisei, or second generation. I imagined that she was yelling at him, as he whacked serve after powerful serve at the corners of the box, something like this: "Don't kick your leg up like that after your topspin serve, you'll never get into Harvard like that!" She didn't sound happy.

But then again, she shagged all the many balls he whacked and delivered the serving hampers to his side so he could whack more. And then, when he was done, he zipped up his rackets and sauntered off, leaving mom to pick up all 100 odd practice balls. Now that's service.

Secret lust for world domination

At a conference in the Fall about the US's place in the world I was talking to this this Yale professor woman about how I thought the rise of China and India in the world economy was just fine and that it was particularly dandy that formerly poor people were becoming more affluent. She wasn't having any of it. She wanted the US to remain dominant, and she sounded somewhat hurt about it.

The sight of Zheng Jie having beat Ana Ivanovic at Wimbledon, some nine months later, evoked a curious response from me. With oil and other commodities going through the roof and sovereign wealth funds snapping up US assets wholesale, the dissolution of US hegemony is no longer a topic for parlor discussion, it's a hard cold fact.

So all of a sudden Zheng Jie pops up and forces me to think, what happens when China and India start to really dominate world athletics, what then? Will all America rally round the women's softball team and a few other medal contenders and beam with pride? Or will be turn nasty and try to lash out with our military? (Oh yeah, as I said last week, we already did that)

We've taken for granted the fact that we dominate, and will soon be learning a lesson or three from other former empires such as the UK and Russia. We would do well emulate the former (in all matters save culinary).

Investing in Iraq

All the quiet coming out of Iraq recently, including the Economist story with the distinctly Vermeeresque cover, would seem to indicate that if there's one place to invest today where you know things aren't going to get worse, it might just be Iraq. They do, for example, have oil. How to actually get retail money there is another question.

The ever-authoritative USA Today reports that the pesky Lebanese and Rumanian are getting the jump on us. Perhaps Bills Miller and Gross will be on the next plane out.

Policy Options

There is a growing consensus amongst talking heads and other prognosticators that the range of traditional monetary and fiscal policy options for combatting our current economic morass are largely exhausted. In earlier, happier times, we might also avail ourselves of the traditional option of starting a war to feel mighty and virile and stoke demand. Unfortunately, we already did that, and it's not working.

Fear -- Lets Have a War

City Island

On Friday I rode North to White Plains, back down through Scarsdale with its Sotheby's storefront and other signs of excess. On Sunday I charted a new course and headed into the city from Larchmont to City Island. City Island, a seafood oasis I had dreamed of for many a moon, tucked away in a corner of a park in the Bronx.

So I went. And it was interesting. A seafood oasis indeed, but striated a little. Closer to the bridge, old-school Italian and Irish-American types fishing, smoking, talking on cell phones in the still humid late afternoon heat. Further out, the scene turns predominantly black and hispanic with a healthy admixture of white folx, and the restaurants look largely more appealing. Some pretty industrial outdoor seating and parking lots, but big platters of fried seafood and ribs and hushpuppies. In short, worth going back to with a credit card.

More on that later.

Budget Sadism on Wall St

So my hair was getting fuzzy and I went to my favorite barber shop down here in financial land, a Bukharan Jewish place (like so many in the city) across from the client site. I had gotten a couple of fine cuts there and spoken some Russian too.

But not today. This guy hardly said a word after I told him to cut it short, he just broke out the clippers and went to work. Short was the request, short it was gonna be. But that wasn't the problem. He cut the sides and back, and then went to work on the detailing. Back and forth along my neck and my ears with the clippers. Put on a clipper extension, do it again. Scrape scrape scrape on my neck. At one point in time, with no warning, he stuck the edge of the clipper in my ear. He didn't ask "Do you want to keep these sideburns?" He just got rid of them. This took like 10 minutes.

The guy was like a fetishist. And this whole time the top of my head was uncut. So I asked if he was gonna do that and he blithely started cutting, no "how would you like it?" no nothing. I'm not going back there. Never before has the delicate dependency one has on the haircutter been clearer.

Crazy birds

These gray birds here in Larchmont keep flying around the head of poor Leno the tabby cat, taunting him mercilessly. They have no shame.

Violence of yore

Caught scenes first from Dirty Harry then from Pulp Fiction on the tube last night. It's funny how defanged classic violence can be on the small screen, how distant the points in history are. Dirty Harry might as well have been from another planet, though the ghosts of stagflation past may yet get us back here. The most gruesome scenes of Tarantino seemed likewise quaint in the kitchen with my mother in law hovering round, providing color commentary.

Damien Walters

An actual Olympic gymnast breaks parkour.



And here he is doing some intense Monty Python shit. The question is, which one of him is real? Is he the tres gay guy in this video pretending to be macho and swaggering in the one above, or the reverse? However you slice it, the guy has talent and cajones.

Good material

So we were standing around the kitchen talking about the buyer protection plans on credit cards, like when you're driving in an unfamiliar state and you buy gas and they call you up and say: "Was that you buying that gas?" So Ted says, "hell, I get calls from the credit card company sometimes saying 'You look fat in that, don't buy it'."

LOL, bitch.

Cured

For the moment, at least, I am cured of commuting to Manhattan. Let us hope I may find a way to make this more or less permanent.

Today drove to the office of my trusty dentist in Somerville, listening to Neal Young. Learned from my dentist that children are typically loss-leaders, relationship- and network- builders, and that the real money is in the aunts, uncles, etc who get referred on the basis of good dental child care and who get higher-margin restorative and cosmetic work done. This suggests -- not surprisingly -- that the baby boom should be driving a lot of volume in the dental world.

A den of naysayers

It is difficult to work in an environment where people are trained to find fault with everything. People spend an inordinate amount of time engaged in CYA, for fear they will get blasted by their peers around the next corner. It's fairly exhausting.

Or so I'm told.

I remember nothing of my commute today, though I at least got in no wrecks. I am certain that I sat next to someone, and that I exited at Newark and took the PATH to Ground Zero. There was a pretty blonde on the PATH, it's true, who was probably Polish. Other than that the surface of Being was smooth and slippery, and nothing stuck. Which is becoming a pattern.

Fight time

Today the Princeton graduate student soccer game was witness to an actual fight: adult men hitting each other in the face, falling on each other, being pulled apart. Blood. It was pretty surreal. Middle class adults don't typically fight. I watched it happen and didn't really believe what I was seeing.

The End of the World

Beth was talking to someone from Bear Stearns who was prognosticating about the end of the world. "A market event, or the real deal?" I asked.

Indeed, recently I have heard serious people actually say things like that for the first time, they can envisage the end of the world. Climate change and its implications for intensely populated areas. Resource contention driven by the rise of consumer expectations in emerging markets. With terrorism as a wildcard. Think about the risks associated with an America in economic freefall as markets and the dollar continue to degenerate. We still have the world's most powerfall military, even if it's in a quagmire. People are proud of it, and may seek to use it to prop up our sense of self. In some sense, Iraq is already that. What if America becomes the wounded dog that bites? What if Iraq becomes for us what Afghanistan was for Russia, the straw that brakes the camel's back?

But, then again, millenialism and eschatology have historically been cyclical phenomena. Malthus comes in and out of style, as the Economist reminds us from time to time. Why, as early as 1988 I initiated a "Millenialism Watch" as part of the countdown to 2000, and found no end of fodder.

A real risk point, sadly, is the Obama assasination meme. Lets say he does get elected. A bunch of crackers are going to be not real happy. What then?

Posting rhythm

Readers,

Apologies for the difficulties in getting posts out during the week. My mindspace is pretty full up trying to get in the groove on a new project. I'll keep getting it out there when I can, so keep coming back.

The Grouse

The new late art

The Canadian director Atom Egoyan's early works: The Adjuster, Family Viewing, The Sweet Hereafter etc, all fell into a single bucket: a critique of inauthenticity and distance in suburbia. Well-trodden ground, but he trod it well and distinctively and with great cinematography and casting (Elias Koteas as the signature lead).

I never saw his film about going to Armenia to revisit his roots, but with Away from Her he stepped into entirely new territory. Here the distance between people, an older couple still much in love, is medically driven: Julie Christie -- stunning as ever -- gets Alzheimer's disease and forgets her husband when she goes into and old folx home. The movie is about watching the husband come to terms with this.

Same beautiful cinematography. Same tricks, sort of, but an entirely new thrust. I think Egoyan's turn is something we're going to see a lot more of as the population ages. Cultural producers who were cynical in their early periods who refocus themselves to find ways to be a little more charitable with and accepting humanity but retain the drive to insight that made them worthwhile. Looking for something that's positive but not Hallmark milquetoast like the family feelgood stuff coming out of Hollywood (Dan in Real Life). We may hope that others make the effort to turn the corner as Egoyan has rather than rest on the laurels of their youth. You can see it in Aki Kaurismaki already, and I'd like to see Jarmusch and the Coen brothers mature too.

A cause for tears

Towards the end of Natalie's soccer practice the other day, I went across the field and was catching up with my friend Tom, and really wasn't paying attention to what was going on on the field. All of a sudden the coach, Paul, calls out to me: "Clark! Come here!" So I hustled over, and heard Natalie crying. As I approached, I saw that her hands were over her face and she was sobbing. Oh shit, I'm thinking, she got banged in the face with the ball or something.

But no. She had scored an own goal (or thought that she had, the other coach said the ball was already in the goal when her foot hit it). This in a 5 on 5 game of novice 7- and 8- year olds with no ref, no goalies, and no scorekeeping. She was inconsolable for a few minutes.

So where did she get this, this extreme anxiety about making a mistake, even in the most casual of settings. I don't think we've ever encouraged it. Peer pressure is no frickin joke. Or is this a biochemical / temperament thing?

Watch this now

The best of everything. Soccer + Capoeira + Parkours.

Waiting Hell

In Ilya Kabakov's early eighties essay "On Emptiness"*, the artist carries on about how Russian railway stations are hell on earth, filthy disgusting places where one feels that one is stuck forever to sit and observe kitchy art. I've come to feel the same way about Newark Penn Station, where all too often I find myself stuck for 20 minutes at the end of the day -- 20 minutes that I don't get to spend with my kids. The place just sucks. All too often I find myself there, sweaty, pushing to get on a train, then standing all the way home. Why do I live in this shithole of a region?

*Between Spring and Summer
Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, 1990
translated from the Russian by Clark Troy

A week from Hell

At around 3 this afternoon I walked outside the building and realized that I hadn't been in fresh air outside of commuting hours all week. Now, the building has good features like indoor plumbing, elevators (when they come) and chairs, but I don't love it that much. Yes, fair readers, they're actually making me work for a living for once in my life.

Tomorrow I'm off to the City of Elms, also known as the Paris of the 80s, to commune with people I haven't seen for 20 years. Sadly, have not been able to put together a soccer game.

Details to follow.

No time to eat

I once didn't understand what people were talking about when they said they didn't have time to eat because they were working so hard. "Oh please," I thought, or perhaps "Cmon." But now I have joined their ranks.

And I'll tell you, I'm less hungry, too, and conceivably am losing weight. So maybe there's something to be said for stress.

I have been told it was a lovely day today.

Orhan Pamuk -- Snow

Boris Gasparov praised Pamuk to me and others backed it up, so Mary got me a couple for my birthday. Not for naught did the Nobel Committee hook him up with the big prize. The guy does indeed have a distinctive voice and vision, shot through with muted echoes of Magical Realism mixed with the big grasp of the Russians. In fact, I don't know why I'm writing about it. Time to go read.

The Brooklyn Bridge at night

Is quite nice, all lit up. One of the perks of my new job. Except of course the at night part of it.

Gotta go. Maybe I'll think of a real topic on the way home. Did I mention my compost?

A new vegetarian?

I never buy chicken, could probably count the number of times I've bought it not under direct instruction from Mary ("Skinless, boneless thighs -- organic") on a hand or two. So yesterday when I had to pick up chicken for dinner and couldn't get just cuts we wanted but they had whole chickens (lets not even mention the fact that I went to the wrong store), I called up Mary. "Should I just get a whole chicken?" "Sure," she says, so I got a whole chicken, tender, young, organic.

Problem was, it wasn't cut up. I had noticed that as I bought it, I just assumed that Mary, cook that she was, would know how to cut it up. I assumed wrong. Not only did she not know how, she flat out refused.

So who gets to cut the chicken? Not surprisingly, butchery being a masculine art, the man of the house does. Me. So I did it, and it was disgusting. Following the instructions layed down in the Joy of Cooking but with suboptimal knives, I cut through raw flesh and bone and fat, pushing and pulling and muttering and cursing and, after one accident, bleeding. Never again.

Marxism has a term for all this: reification. The process of forgetting how things are made. God bless reification. Now I know why we pay Mexicans down in the Siler City and Smithfield and whatnot all of $6 an hour to process poultry. It's nasty nasty work.

Princeton Junction Train Platform, 6:10 AM

Their in the early morning crush on the platform I heard this convo, roughly, truncated:

Jersey Woman (shades, earrings, voice, etc) "So did you have fun at Disney World? Did you eat at Flying Fish? I really like it there, I could get the swordfish, the scallops...
Guy: "Yeah, it was great"
JW: "Yeah, the best thing is is that they have no refrigeration, it's all fresh every day."
G: "Mmm hmm"
JW: "What did Jenny do?"
G: "She did some shopping"
JW: "Oh yeah, what'd she buy?"
G: "Cosmetics"
JW: "Oh that's great! Did she go to the Aveda?"

And so on and on. People in their 50s. Beyond banal.

Across the tracks on the other platform, the crazy jock preacher guy who works this beat was walking back and forth regaling us with hellfire and brimstone.

I boarded and had to hustle to get the last available seat in that car.

Volume play

My compost is, quite literally, smoking. Let me tell the tale. This weekend I cleared out the old pile and wheelbarrowed it up for Mary, because I had a backlog of grass clippings and had to mow the yard again. And lots of bags of "brown gold," alias other people's yard waste harvested in Fall and archived through Winter. I decided that, this time, rather than pre-curing the clippings in little side piles, I would make a volume play from the jump street. That is, really big pile with fresh clippings, less fresh clippings, earth, and leaves all mixed in there pretty good. Little did I know what awaited....

Steam! At the core! After one day, no less. It's phenomenenomenal, as Homer might say. This pile is flat out cookin. I'm tempted to dump even more bags of brown on, and can't wait to mow again. The Garden State, indeed.

Insomnia

Having been thrown into what everyone is calling a "crisis" situation -- and they admitted that it is but the tail end of a 10 week time "on war footing," I am now the leader ultimately accountible for making the right things happen. Reallistically none of this shit is gonna get laid at my door, but they do look for me for guidance on a set of problems and relationships I have only generic insight into. Now I know I won't hold the bag for things that go wrong, I still feel as if it's all on me.

First off, this is new territory for the kid. A growth opportunity? For sure. And yet to go through it is like fingernails on a blackboard, or, more to the point, insomnia.

A vision from h-e-double tootpicks, it was

I'm usually reading on the train, so it can be forgiven that I didn't see anything going on with the old GM truck plant in Linden. So it came as something of a surprise to me when I looked left from train home the other day and saw a vision from 9/12. The plant was never the most prepossessing structure, but it's still quite a shock to see a void of rubble and metal of that scale. For your viewing pleasure, here's the movie. Actually, one of many.

12:08 East of Bucharest

For those of you who've heard something of a Rumanian New Wave, there's something to it. Judging by the this movie and The Death of Mr Lazarescu, there's a new voice and cadence over there, very slow soft and human and down to earth, the polar opposite of the brash shootemups of popular Russian films. Perhaps closer to the tone of Iranian films, though less transcendent. I'll watch more for sure.

Nothing doing

Spent half the day with a hot potato pressed against my eyelid, so I have almost nothing to report.

It was good to see Natalie whacking a ball with a tennis racket in the backyard and professing an interest in sports, I must say. Something must have happened at school. And Graham too swung and struck a ball with a bat, no less. Something in the Jersey air, must be.

PATH train from Exchange Place to Newark

A gaggle of young homeys got on the train, five of them black and one with a jewfro who wanted to be. They had different styles, one with dreads, one a bling wannabe, lots of retro Nikes. They stood around and talked and shrieked and cackled the whole way to Newark, niggah this and bitch that, a very interesting ritual of communal utterance where each competed to make the next crack, and the noise never once died back. It was a classic pack performance: "We don't care what you (anyone else) think."

Across from me was a guy who would once have been called a Cosby, 35ish black investment banker type in khakis and dress shirt. He kept his eyes closed the whole time, or looked at his Blackberry. Down at the other end of the car, however, were older black people, who were visibly displeased with all the n-words and whatnot.

Little going on

Settling into a new project leaves precious little time to think about anything but work and this frickin stye on my eye (where else, after all?).

Have had recent tune infusions which have offered respite. Those who've got South Slavic Womens' music in mind should check out my friend Corinna's group Black Sea Hotel. If you're more in a Marvin Gaye state of mind, have a look at Hobex, which everybody in North Carolina has known about forever but nobody ever tells me about anything. Check out the rare lap slide/funk combo below with our boy Grumphreys at the helm.

Back to the grindstone

After a couple of relatively blissful weeks in central NJ, it's back to Manhattan for the kid, who once more will be helping a large financial institution clean up messes and make things run all smootherly. This, of course, means more exciting commutes, more thrilling lunches, more of almost anything but work or my marriage, for I am much much wiser than that.

Manifethd Dethdiny

The Economist had an article last week about how the blight of crystal meth seems to be abating in parts of the rural West as it is replaced by more benigh drug addictions like crack, heroin, and oxycontin. I can just see the op-eds in the red state lands of sagebrush decrying how society's going to hell in a handbasket of drugs because men in boots and hats can't get good, self-respectin work on ranches and in Coen brothers movies. I say it's just another indication that the Buffalo Commons hypothesis is proving true. We really weren't meant to settle the plains like we did, they can't sustain agriculture, and now we get meth mouth to prove it.

A travesty

Let me just say that, though the Rolling Stone greatest 100 guitarists in history got a number of things right, one thing collective wisdom erred on was Pete Townsend's place in the Pantheon. Having him at 50 is ridiculous. I just watched a rockumentary on VH1 (yet another way to show my age) and it's astonishing how original and strong he is as a guitarist. If Keith Richards, who is not a technician but a guy with a style, comes in at 10 or so, Townsend belongs in the same neighborhood fer sure.

20,000 hits

Let me note in passing that today we blew past the 20,000 hit mark, about 17 months after we nailed 10,000. Thanks to all yall for coming back.

Job numbers

For where we are presumed to be in the economic cycle, job numbers keep coming back not half bad. Initial jobless claim 4-week moving average still well below 400,000, headline unemployment at 5.0 going perhaps to 5.1 (remember that a decade ago Paul Krugman himself was saying 5.5-6% was as low as unemployment could go before things became inflationary).

One wonders if corporations are particularly loathe to lay off now because they're seeing the bigger picture of baby boomer retirement coming down the road, and therefore particularly fear the cost of onboarding and training. Also because of uncertainty around potential future employees' ability to relocate in the uncertain housing market of 12-24 months out.

Who knows. For the moment, at least, they ain't fired the kid.

Our man in Raleigh

We would be remiss indeed if we failed to note the victory of our pick for the North Carolina State Senate's 16th district, Josh Stein, who handily crushed some other guys in the Democratic primary yesterday while all eyes were on Obama. Full on, say we.

The really big show

Down to Chapel Hill over the weekend for the Pressure Boys reunion in support of cystic fibrosis research (go HERE to buy stuff to contribute). Two good quality nights, they played superbly given that they hadn't played together in 19 years and are all now old as fuck. Just as importantly it was old home week with much crew in the hisouse.

Now back to work.

One last day

The polls are open today for the North Carolina primaries and the eyes of all America are focused squarely on the big race: Josh Stein vs. some other guy for the NC State Senate's 16th District. We have long since cast our lot with Stein, having grown up next door to him and knowing him to be a good solid citizen with a long record of dedicated civil service who looks good in khakis and oxford cloth.

Talked to Whitey today who was headed out to do some poll observing over lunch. There's a lot of community involvement going on down there these days, which makes me right proud.

All too hot off the presses -- Baikal warming faster than atmosphere

This just in from the Moscow Times via Mark Izeman of the National Resources Defense Counsel. Again, going back two posts to our comment on the inability of index makers and securitizers to adequately model and price things, here's another cautionary tale about the limits of scientific knowledge, or rather the fact that science is ever evolving, which urges caution and humility.

Catherine Santore/For MT
Lake Baikal is warming faster than the atmosphere, potentially endangering
some of its wildlife, scientists say.

Baikal Challanges Global Warming Idea

05 May 2008

BloombergNEW YORK -- Lake Baikal is warming faster than the atmosphere,
challenging the idea that large bodies of water can withstand global
warming, U.S. and Russian scientists said.

Baikal, which holds 20 percent of the world's fresh water, has warmed by
1.21 degrees Celsius since 1946, said Marianne Moore, assistant professor of
biological sciences at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Global
temperatures have risen 0.76 degrees Celsius since industrialization, a
United Nations panel on climate change said in March.

The Siberian lake holds more than 2,500 plant and animal species, including
the world's only exclusively freshwater seal, and some could become extinct
by continued warming, said Moore, co-author of a report on Lake Baikal to be
published this month in the journal Global Change Biology. The study
challenges the idea that thermal inertia of oceans, seas and large lakes
would make them more resistant to climate change, Moore said.

"The warming that we're seeing in this lake is of more concern than that of
any other lake because of the extraordinary biodiversity," Moore said. "You
could potentially lose the Baikal seal."

Beginning in the 1940s, data on Lake Baikal was collected by Mikhail Kozhov,
a professor at Irkutsk State University. The research was carried on by his
daughter and granddaughter, Lyubov Izmesteva, a co-author of the journal
article.

The family has taken samples of the lake every seven to 10 days since 1946,
amassing a history that Moore analyzed. The data revealed that the lake's
average summer temperature has increased by 2.4 degrees, Moore said.

"My jaw just dropped to the floor when I heard this," Moore said. "I was
extremely surprised that the data set even existed."



© Copyright 2007. The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.

On poop and predators

Continuing the discussion from the last post, let us pose a new question: what is the climate change impact of our our new neighbors in our land of no predation, all those deer, bunnies, geese, and frickin woodchucks living the life with no foxes and wolves to put them in their place?

Deer, for instance. They eat understory vegetation, making what woods we have left amenable to traipsing and galavanting a most any hour of the day. So what are they doing carbon-wise, are they nibbling down what would be useful carbon sink? Is the loss of greenery offset by the soil enrichment of their caca? Same for bunnies, only smaller. And what of those geese and their issue, is it good for the soil? Does it encourage or hinder growth?

What is the impact of the loss of understory vegetation on forest fire probability? Does it make it more difficult for fires to spread?


On the downside, I saw a neighbor who has lattice-like paving stones in his driveway to let grass grow through trimming the grass with a gas-powered weed eater. The grass is always greener indeed.

Flock of Black Swans

Marketwatch reports today:

"Top officials with the National Association of Realtors and Standard & Poor's, which issues the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, agreed this week their monthly reports are giving imprecise readings of price changes at all levels -- national, state and regional -- due to rare market conditions that are skewing survey results.

The NAR reported last week that U.S median home prices fell 7.7% in March from a year ago. The decline resulted largely from a market anomaly -- a steep decline in costlier home sales due to tighter lending standards and high jumbo-mortgage rates, coupled with a foreclosure-driven spike in cheaper homes."

Never mind the fact that it's the NAR speaking here, consummate "we've found the bottom" spinners, what's this about "rare market conditions" and "market anomalies?" Oh, what they're saying is "our indices don't work in this kind of housing bubble downturn because they're designed to reflect other kinds of market downturns," which is blather. There's nothing "rare" going on here as a statistical phenomenon, however rare it may be as an economic one. Housing prices will act exactly like this whenever this kind of thing happens, it's normal and rule-conforming behavior in these situations. What the index makers are really saying is "we can't model what we said we were going to model, because we've never seen it before, in all 7 years or our index's existence."

We've seen a profusion of black swans recently: "We have 100-year events all the time now." What few will say is that we really don't know how to model things, with all the statistical and computational tools at our disposal, we don't know what the inputs are. There are no black swans on the East Coast, but there is a lot of migrating goose poop.

Non-fiction day

It was non-fiction day the other day in Natalie’s 2^nd grade class. All the kids had written non-fiction books and were to present them to visiting adults as a way of developing their presentation skills (clue 1 that things have changed since we were young, though thankfully they weren’t learning powerpoint).

Natalie was the only kid two put together two books one on cats, the other on pets, including cats. They were pretty good, truth be owned, though less verbose than some of the others, full of pretty nifty drawings and some interesting feline facts as well.

But, as always, the other kids’ books and “presentations” were equally interesting. For example, there was a little WASP boy sitting across from a little Hispanic girl. When I went up to their table and asked “who wants to tell me about their book?” He practically lept off of his chair. And then he told me all about castles, and moats, and catapults, and ramparts, and tunneling, and defenestration (well, almost), on and on in the most excruciating detail. Had he been an adult, I would have slapped him or shaken him by the shoulders. For an 8-year old, it was pretty impressive. Meanwhile the little Hispanic girl had written a book about chores, like mopping and washing dishes, which included comments like “doing chores can make you very tired.” And then there was the little at least half-Asian girl with the book about her parakeet breaking out of its cage and pooping on the windowsill (“it was green”) with exquisite drawings of Venetian blinds and parakeet (the poop was pretty good too), which she narrated with adult-like composure.

Something to keep in mind

I was visiting with a former client yesterday when I was reminded that one of their team had passed away, so I asked about the guy, who was, like, my age. And the guy I was talking to says: "Well, they were getting ready to move to another house and he was down in the basement moving boxes of books around" and I thought I saw the obvious denoument, lifts heavy box, has heart attack. If only things were so simple in life, so the guy keeps going "and it got to be lunchtime, and he sat down and choked on a roast beef sandwich. It got stuck in his throat and there was nobody around, and he died." Which was a new one for me. And gives new meaning and credence to Keith Ferrazzi's dictum "Never eat alone."

No but seriously, that's hard.

Basketball Jones

Even being as equal opportunity offensive as it is, it's difficult to imagine the video being released today.

Day of inquiry

I should be posting about something clever and market related to capitalize on traffic sent over by Felix Salmon's Market Movers blog. But in fact, after a morning conversation with some lofty denizens of the financial district, I have delved into one of the longer-lived mysteries of our time: the lingering question of Jamie Lee Curtis's hermaphroditism.

I must note that I was inspired in this quest by my recent rediscovery of the most excellent series of children's books she has put together with artist Laura Cornell, most recently (in our rotation) I'm Gonna Like Me, Where Do Balloons Go?, and The Human Race, all of which Graham and I have been enjoying immensely. They are as good as children's books get these days, and may take their place in the pantheon of great along with Dr. Seuss, Curious George and Mrs. Moskowitz and the Sabbath Candlesticks.

But I digress. Hermaphroditism. This rumor has clung to Jamie Lee like the gerbil to Gere, and is no less ticklish. And on what evidence? A boyish name? Adopted children? And what are the counterarguments? True Lies, Trading Places, Perfect, and, of course, this month's shocking topless cover photo of the AARP magazine. OK. Maybe that's not a counter-argument.

In any case, I must say that a few minutes due diligence has resolved little, but has aided and abetted digestion.

AAA -- shill about town.

AAA is one of those organizations you have to belong to -- everybody needs a tow or a jump now and then -- and yet it's so heinous in its untiring advocacy of all that's motorific that you have to wonder. Usually I toss the AAA magazine as soon as it comes in, but today I snuck a peak at an article on small, fuel-efficient cars. Perhaps there's one I haven't heard of, I thought. But no, of the three "efficient" cars in there, the best is a Mini at 27/34 highway, and there's also the BMW 128i, sporting 18/28 on the one with the smaller engine, Lord knows what for the one with 300 horses. I've already written about mileage when I was a kid. But this is just ridiculous. There should be no mention of 300 horsepower in an article about fuel-efficient.

Merrill Lynch, slackers

While getting my 401k out of Merrill Lynch and moving it to its current roost was in some ways 100 times easier than getting Mary's 403b out of TIAA-CREF: we got it done in one conference call rather than months of hand-wringing bullshit. But then, after moving so swiftly to extract the ducats, I'm informed that Merrill can send them to the recipient either by 1st Class mail (7-10 business days) or by UPS (4 days), and the latter is excluded because the new home uses a PO Box. So all my money is dangling in the USPS zone for 7-10 days, and a lot of them have been good market days.

Now, as market news geeks know, some significant portion of one's lifetime gains can come from being in the market when things turn. This underlies the buy and hold and dollar-cost averaging theologies. So imagine my dismay at having this non-pathetic bucket of cash out being shuffled between mail bins somewhere between here and its destination in the MidWest.

Merrill Lynch is a classic "wirehouse," in industry terms, whatever the fuck that means. Why don't they wire my money?

Life's little mysteries

Why is it that, "Point of Sale," as they say, you have to select whether you're using a credit or a debit card. With all the info they put onto a card, you'd think they could squeeze that in there.

You may infer that there was little going on in my world today, and you would not err in so inferring. I sat at my desk and operated within the thin walls of Microsoft: Excel, Powerpoint, Word, with continual forays into Firefox. It was one of the first warm days of the year, but already our un climate-controlled third floor got clammy. But at least I got on no trains nor cars (hardly).

Theft, it turns out

Until Mike burned me a disc recently, Richard Hell and the Voidoids were a name I knew well, without actually knowing the tunes. Here's their big hit, which is a great song with a great hook indeed, but it's just as interesting to hear how shamelessly Brian Seltzer and the Stray Cats ripped them off.

Graham throws the frisbee

Mary doesn't remember this, but when he was 18-24 months, Graham was a little jock. When I rolled a ball to him on the floor, he could time its trajectory and reach out and catch it about as well as Natalie could at the same point in time.

However, as the years have progressed and he's been diagnosed with first low tone and then fine and gross motor delays (the former surely shared by his papa), he's become progressively less jocky.

So when I took a frisbee with me when I walked down to the preschool to pick him up (yes, we do live well) and then he rode back with me on his bike, I threw the frisbee and tried to keep it on the long straight sidewalks beneath the flowering trees. Once I hit a tree and took down a branch. After that, that's all Graham wanted to see.

But when we got back to the house, Graham showed an active interest in the disc, including throwing it, mostly into bushes and trees, trying to knock them down and whatnot. But he was into it.

Retail Structured Product

A couple of years back in a big survey on asset management McKinsey rose up and prophesied the rise of retail structured financial products. It was thinking of fancy shmancy longevity annuities etc.

Frank Partnoy of UC San Diego has written a number of books which argue that Wall Street makes its money on "information asymmetry", making products too complicated for their purchasers to understand them, and sophisticated enough to make the act of purchasing them impute luster to their purchasers.

In the end, then, it looks like fancy mortgages were already that retail structured product that flattered its purchaser with its complexity. "I got 5/1 neg-am ARM." Sounds smooth, no?

What does this imply for the future of financial products? Will there be a return to simplicity, products you can trust?

Party!

CNBC yesterday was celebrating its 19th birthday, and in the spirit of sharing it threw some numbers up onscreen (these are best guess from memory). Since the channel's inception, the indices are up like this:

S & P 352%
Dow Jones 440%
NASDAQ a little bit higher even.

Lets talk about the Dow. Just using the rule of 72 to guide us (if rate x number of periods = 72, then you double your amount) we can see that the Dow has a little more than doubled in 19 years. If it doubled twice in 20 years, the rate would be 7.2%, so lets say the Dow has been rising 8% a year to get 440% over 19 years. Before inflation. Lets knock it down two points to control for inflation and we've got a 6% real rate of return. That's below even conservative estimates of historical inflation-adjusted returns. And returns for the broader S & P are lower.

And this during the heyday of CNBC, since 401ks blossomed and equity markets got huge retail
inflows. What it implies is that the new slap-happy capital markets aren't really doing that superb a job with our money.

8:30 AM, Broad St, across from NYSE

Across from the Exchange, just down the hill but above the Hermes store, there is a swanky apartment building with a very hip lobby in which there is a huge chandelier hung, ironically, just above the floor, asymmetrically off to the left. Other than the elegant chandelier it's all very modern and sleek.

This morning as I passed there were a pair of trader boys in stylish suits and some young lady clearly prostrate before the glamor of this foyer:

Her, with great feeling and no trace of irony: "It's so beautiful!"
One of the hims: "Yeah baby, check that out."

And you could tell this was very important to them.

Urban Arteriosclerosis

In its infinite wisdom, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey continues with its ambitious program of building in and around so-called Ground Zero. Seven years later, the hole is one big construction site, and so is everything for blocks around. Somebody's gettin some sweet kickbax and payola.

Anyhoo, last week they opened a new exit from the PATH station, one which took you out the north side of the station and allowed me to skirt some pedestrian volume at the chokepoint when you left the station. So for a few days I liked it. No more.

Now they've closed the old exit and escalators, and everybody has to come and go through the new one, and it's a nightmare because once you hit the streets everyfrickinbody has to walk through an alley at the north end of the site and it's unbearable. Those of you who don't live in the Metro area can't imagine what it's like to spend whole days when seemingly every step you take is constrained by someone in front of you. It sucks.

Dues paying

It was recently brought to my attention that it is a violation of blogo-netiquette to not link back to someone who links to me. We were not taught this growing up down in the Piedmont.

However, this being the case I am deeply indebted to one Felix Salmon of Portfolio.com's Market Movers, who has linked to me on a number of occasions and has given me what, in my modest terms, are major traffic events. I can also say that, when lunchtime comes around and it's time to do some reading and I'm faced with the vast void of surfing ideas that is my brain before the internet, that I often read Felix's blog and that I do not regret the choice. He stays on top of things pretty good, for a ding diddily danged furner.

Antony and the Johnsons

Just thought to look on YouTube. The guy is a freak, but he has both pipes and soul.

Nedostroiki

A nedostroika is an unfinished building, and there were many of them in Russia in the 80s and 90s, cheap 14-story apartment buildings to be that somehow never got done. The conceptualists Ilya Kabakov and Andrei Monastyrsky viewed them and their attendant stagnant pools of fetid water as an allegory for the failure of the Soviet Union. I don't know if they ever quoted Walter Benjamin take on allegory in the Baroque: "allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things", but they might as well have.

The physical legacies of poor planning occur cyclically. I remember well expanses of excess office space in Cary in 1989, and have read of elevated highways to nowhere in Thailand 1997 and boatloads of excess fiberoptics capacity ca 2002-3. All this stuff tends to work itself out in time.

But what of today's surfeit of McMansions and condos, will they be absorbed into the flow of history, or will they be stripped, looted, and rotted? Time will tell.

Popular Malaise

My reposting of Jimmy Carter's Malaise speech has become the search item which brings the most surfers to the Grouse. One wonders what has been the occasion for its rising up in the consciousness of the Googling masses, if not the likeness of the impasse in which we find ourselves to that of Jimmy's day. Though then the America was under threat from the higher quality of imported products (along with expensive oil), when now -- at the far end of an epochal cycle of retooling -- we are victimized by our omnipresent thirst for bigger and more (along with expensive oil).

The new meatloaf

Those with a certain length of perspective will recall how, in the early 90s, meatloaf and mac and cheese began to appear on the menus of stylish urban restaurants: enhanced comfort foods in the post-Milken Bush I recession which assured us that the "greed is good" ethos applied to others and not us and connected us back to our wholesome Mayberry roots (and eventually shifted a good deal of economic power to Bentonville, Arkansas).

What will be the new comfort food? The food which will demonstrate a symbolic return to our roots, a productivist mirage? Or has the homey already been so thoroughly simulacralized as to be not even resurrectable? Perhaps it will be Naan and saag panir.

No Country for Old Men

This is a good movie, with some good scenes, but it's essentially a shoot em up. Minimal plot. Zero character development. Within the Coen ouevre it's a quarter of the movie Fargo is, and it pales beside Raising Arizona too. So why all the fuss and Oscars?

I mean, it's a fine shoot em up. Good sets and cinematography, fine guy dialog, inventive violence. I'm enjoying it.

Eating in peace

Below is a classic outtake from Luis Bunuel's Phantom of Liberty, otherwise by no means his best film. In it (for those of you too busy to watch the 5 minutes) polite society is transacted as people sit on toilets around a table, where the mere mention of food is scandalous. Towards the end, a man discretely carries himself off to a little eating room at the end of the hall, where he gnaws on some chicken.

I was reminded of this by the lunch culture I see in lots of hard-charging corporate environments, where 90% of lunches are taken at one's desk, as efficiently as possible. Members of senior management may set tone by declaring that they "do not believe in lunch." So food becomes a thing of shame, the barest of necessities. A salad, even.

Monday morning

The cruellest time of all, passing between dimensions. The first train of the week is like shrapnel.

But once I settle into work it almost makes sense.

Religious views

I saw recently that someone had put "I believe in science!" as their religious view on Facebook. True enough.

The problem is that science demonstrates that religion is common to all of mankind, and perhaps is the marker that distinguishes us from other species, as science has shown that "language" has become progressively less able to serve as the thing separating us from beasts since Rousseau first served up that hypothesis in the 1780s. People have religion, animals don't.

Perhaps what religion really gives us is an ability to organize our lives around a bigger narrative framework, a sense that we're going from somewhere to somewhere, which allows us to at least sometimes defer gratification and get other things done.

Don't get me wrong, religion does kinda suck and the whole "ecrasez l'infame" thing has made modern life possible. But at the end of the day, it's still the end of the day, and that's where Pascal's Wager appears less wrong.

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is....

..."God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. "No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all."

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. "That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much." Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.

-Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662

There is, perhaps, no downside risk. But when do you have to bet? Catholics allow for deathbed conversion, Mormons collect terabytes of genealogical data to facilitate the retroactive conversion of ancestors when they snag a convert (which pisses some Jews off to no end). Calvinists held a longer view similar to Pascal: since we don't know shit about God, you have to basically assume that he's gonna smite sinners, and so undertake a course of Godliness from right about when you put down the pacifier.

But I digress. At the end of the day religiousity as a species marker probably has everything to do with our general tendency to be abstract and goal-oriented.

Jhumpa'in the gun

After finishing watching The Namesake, and operating on the usually reasonable assumption that the book is at least as good as the novel, I retract my earlier call upon Jhumpa Lahiri to do more. This was a really good and emotionally real movie, which means that a box of Kleenex is recommended for all but the coldest of heart. A touch overwrought at times, but beautifully acted and well rhythmed and resolved. Rent and watch.

My how they mature

It's Jhumpa Lahiri weekend here in Princeton, where we're watching the movie of The Namesakeand then here's my old contemporary Liesl Schillinger writing a review or her new book in the Times Book Review. Before diving into the quasi-catty let me say that I like Lahiri, I thought The Interpreter of Maladies was a very solid collection of stories and observations and this movie is good too, though I've not read the book.

But I'd like to take a second to look at the branding of Lahiri. The jacket cover photo of her first book was all babeliciousness, as were other pix of her when she promoted the book.


But now there's a new Lahiri, as seen below. There are, admittedly, nine years intervening between the two pictures, but it looks like 22 have passed, and amongst them 9/11. What we are being told is that she is now a senior, authoritative woman of letters, and Schillinger will surely not disabuse us of this. I dunno, I think she's good but from the description of her new stories she could push herself a little harder. I think of Ang Lee as a natural peer, someone whose early work (Eat Drink Man Woman, The Wedding Banquet, Pushing Hands) meditated thoughtfully on issues of cultural conflict and combination, before he moved on to do good to great work in other genres. I'd like to see more before the claims of seniority are arrogated to her.

But, anyhow, no crime compares with Vikram Seth's failure to give us a sequel to A Suitable Boy.

Reading partner, the aftermath

So on the way out the door, and in the car on the way to school, and on the way from the car into school, Natalie kept asking if I had to come with her to class because not many parents really did it and she really didn't want me to, etc. On and on. And then we got into the school and on the way down the hall she quickened her pace so that she wouldn't be seen with me. And then we got into the classroom and...

It was reading time. So first she read a book to Bridget and she leaned against me and then Bridget read us a book and she kissed my nose and climbed on my back and leaned on me and then I read an Amelia Bedelia book and, well, I think you know how that goes. Amelia Bedelia is funny, and girls love her. So it all went well in the end.

Reading Partner

Tomorrow right after drop off I will be Natalie's reading partner in the classroom. It will be interesting to see if she will hold my hand anywhere on the school grounds, or if that phase is over.

Bedtime, Spring '08

Natalie is in a phase where all she wants to do is play a nose kissing game: I try to kiss her nose, she mine, and we both fight it. She also likes to get backrubs, both Mom-style (feather-like) and Dad-style (more traditional).

Graham, on the other hand, is all about kissing time: on the nose, the mouth, the cheeks. This is a particularly sweet period for him, once he gets done fighting putting on his jammies.

Contractual obligation

It's late and I have to get up early for train to Manhattan and here I am trying to think of things to write about to fulfill my statutory blogging obligation.

My dad turned 70 today and my commute was miserable. But at least it's Spring and the Tar Heels are in the Final Four and, lest we should forget, our man Josh Stein is mounting a forceful drive at the North Carolina State Senate. So all's well.

Full speed

After a grisly day, energy sapped by haven woken up at 4am and not gotten back to sleep for real before 5:45 wakie wakie time, everybody at work consumed by similarly low energy and loping negativity, I walked the streets of lower Manhattan looking for something interesting. And there, around 8:30pm along Duane St between Broadway and Trimble Street, he came... Some Hispanic pizza delivery guy -- having delivered a pie -- came sprinting past, his thermal pizza bag drooping by his side. Sprinting, mind you, flat out, and no pizzeria within blocks.

That's what I call a good attitude. He wasn't sitting around kvetching about things being behind and implying it was somebody in the skyscraper across the way's fault. He was porting pies.

Leaving the little guys behind

Marketwatch today reported on how many people fleeing homes and mortgages are leaving behind pets: dogs, cats, you name it. This took me back to the good old days in Moscow, where it was the habit of folks to leave animals behind in the city when they went to the country to their dachas in the summer. I know, it doesn't make sense, you'd think the animals would be happy and useful in the country side, but maybe they wouldn't let them on trains, whatever.

In any case, what you'd end up with was packs of wild dogs, roaming the streets. And yes, some of them became rapid. And yes, they were also pretty pathetic and and liked to be fed. And there are specific classes of rubber-tear gas bulletspouting sawed off handguns that experts consider optimal for deterring packs of wild dogs. I kid you not.

One of these days, if I get enough energy, I will tell you the tale of the one we called devushka.