End of year riches

At this time of year, these long days off, it's hard to know what to consume.  On the one hand, there are all these books I'm in the middle of, most prominently Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones and Ron Susskind's somewhat overrated Confidence Men, but also that biography of Henry Aaron that I need to polish off. Just finished John Elder Robison's Look Me in the Eye, which is well worth reading.

But then there's all the year end journalism, including the Economist year-end edition, always good, and the New York Times necrographies of those who died during the year, including Ira Glass's "These American Lives," much of which is touching.  And then, being here in Larchmont, there are all these Time magazines lying around, and many of the cover stories resonate.

And then there are movies to watch with the kids, including Elf, surprisingly good, with Will Farrell and James Caan and Ed Asner and Zoey Deschanel. 

And new CDs.  It's all just so much.

The Christmas Spirit

It is a shame in many ways that I am so apart from the giving part of Christmas.  I participate in gifts Mary and I give the kids, but I never do any shopping whatsoever, now that the family has gotten out of the habit of giving gifts between adults.  Which is kind of a shame.  It is, admittedly, a total pain in the ass to figure out what people want, and I have done considerable and pretty successful research trying to find new Christmas music for Mary, but other than that I've been totally out of the hunt. Ahh well. Maybe next year.

Lessons and Carols

Just went to the Christmas eve service at the Episcopal Church in Larchmont. After all one reads about the waning of the traditional denominations, I felt like I was doing the church a favor by putting on a jacket and showing up. I needn't have worried. The little church was packed to the gills with dolled up WASPs.  Here in Westchester, the ruling class lives.

And they put on a nice little pageant, the kids did. Confident 7-year olds in front of the mike.

The odd thing was that the carols differed.  "Away in a manger" was sung to a completely different melody.  "Go Tell It on the Mountain" was very officious and formal.  I grew up singing:

Once I was a sinner,
I sinned both night and day.
I asked the Lord to help me,
And he showed me the way...

Go tell it on the mountain yatta yatta

Here they picked other verses:

While shepherds kept their watching
o'er silent flocks by night,
behold, throughout the heavens
there shone a holy night.. yatta yatta

And some other voice closely tied to the Xmas story. The point is, it was very formal, nothing about sin or salvation, as we had in our southern rendition, which certainly felt more influenced by Baptist, Methodist, proto-charismatic traditions where the emphasis was much more on the personal connection to Christ, the Lord, the whole nine.

At the end of the day, I don't feel a strong need to go back to church anytime soon.  I got my taste for now.

Young adults

Interesting discussion with Diablo Cody on NPR this morning about her new film Young Adult.  She mentioned that the movie was typical for our generation because we were so incredibly self-involved and rearwards-facing, that with Facebook and all we have succeeded in "completely recreating high school" and judge ourselves relative to our peers based on wealth, etc. yatta yatta.  Obviously I find this an interesting comment.  Initially it sounds very deep and true.

But, then again, it ain't all that true.  The prior condition, that of earlier generations, was of limited mobility where people lived in the same place and had relatively stable social environments over the course of their lives. More people lived amongst those they went to high school, and so were already doing the stuff she talks about. America has traditionally been a place of relative mobility, and certainly the Depression-era, WWII, and post-war generations did move around some. Those that did were less able to keep in touch with those they grew up with, and that's frankly kind of a loss.

At the end of the day, I don't feel oppressed by social networks or the fact that I'm back in my hometown.  I'm happy to see friends of mine who are doing well, but it's not really about money. The ones with good vibes in their homes and happy kids are in that category. I could give a fuck how rich people are, I want to see a good aura.

Check Engine

The "Check Engine" light on our 1996 Subaru Legacy Outback has been on for about 6 months now. It has been coming and going for many years now, almost always put down to a solenoid switch somewhere in the transmission, which we've fixed a few times. How liberating, then, it was to read a couple of years ago in the Journal about how Paul Kasriel -- the chief economist of Northern Trust. Kasriel -- according to his daughter -- put a piece of tape over the very same indicator on his 1995 Outback.

I will confess that, as we prepare to pack the thing Griswold-full of stuff to drive north to New York for the holidays, I am sorely tempted to take it in to the shop for them to double check that nothing is wrong with the car. It is, after all, gently creeping up on 200,000 miles (we probably won't quite make it there on this trip).

Mostly, though, it makes me wonder if I should have been an economist. Certainly, just writing this reminds me that I should try to drive the thing a little bit today so I can be sure to check the oil, which sometimes gets low this late in the oil change cycle.  We're about 2400 miles into the 3k cycle, so I should really get it changed in up North (if not before).

Xmas tunes

Thought this was published on Monday Started a quest for new Xmas music on Facebook last night, and got some good suggestions (if you're friended to me, and likely are, check out the thread). Then I realized that all I really needed to do was go to YouTube and look up "Lo How a Rose e'er Blooming," because the song is really difficult to mess up. Here are three versions. One we've been listening to for a couple of years, and a couple of ones new to us. Tallis Scholars Sufjan Stevens Feist Actually, the Feist version somehow stuck in my head so much that I was seemingly unable to go to sleep till about 2am, despite or perhaps because of the fact that I was in an excellent mood. Somehow new music and the promise of new music, particularly in a category where we had been stalled, got me all worked up, right when I needed it least.

The Colonel Sanders Story

After a somewhat crappy day at work, came home and turned on the TV. The soccer on FSC was kind of middling and definitely a comedown after last night's defenestration of Man U by Basel (who were impressive), so I ended up on CNBC, for the first time in years, really since the crisis. While eating my Chinese leftovers, I settled in to watching "How I Made My Millions," which featured first a guy who made mattresses, and then a woman who printed bags and other promotional materials. Now I'm watching the biography of Colonel Sanders. I gotta tell you, CNBC is striking a good note here. Instead of focusing on financial markets or drug dealers or pornography, as it so often does, it's going back to the roots and looking at entrepreneurs. Of course, I really should be working, but that's another story entirely.

Driving and spacing

Was driving Graham to Tae Kwon Do today, after I dropped Natalie off at her singing lesson, when I put on Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations, which my uncle Ballard gave me vinyl of a quarter of a century ago and which I've never grown tired of. This is, by the way, the recording of the second time he recorded them, from the early 80s. When Gould recorded them the first time, in the 50s, it was, if memory serves correctly, a career-making event, and listening to the two recordings one after another is a fascinating study in growth/maturation/flux, but that's a different blog post entirely, and one which I may have already written... In any case, I was driving along listening and, before I knew it, I found myself going 40 in a 45 zone, even though I should have been going 50 to be sure of getting Graham to class on time. This is, of course, a great space to be in. After class, I will face a dilemma, because Car Talk is on and even Graham seems to enjoy listening to Click and Clack. This is what is known as an embarassment of riches.

Long, slow weekend

My zealous colleagues kept sending me emails but I've done my best to ignore them. It has, after all, been a holiday weekend, and I've been in need of a holiday. Natalie, Graham and I hit the Muppet Movie today at the Lumina, where some very geeky kids gave us very good service. One guy even opened the door for me when I had nothing in my hands but a bottle of lemonade and some peanuts. One thing a long recession does is make suburban kids appreciate whatever freaking job their scrawny selves can get. No more "I'm gonna be an entrepreneur" or "I'm gonna day trade" for the pre-diploma set, just slingin sodas like we used to back in the day. At Tyler's on Saturday night I was trying to talk to a guy I hadn't seen in like 20 years when these graduate student or early 30s women were trying to flirt with us. On the one hand, it's nice, but on the other hand, I hadn't seen the guy in 20 years, and I'm freaking married. Can they not see the ring on my finger? If they wanted to get my attention, they need to be thinking about buying me a plate of nachos grande or a Cheerwine or something, things I can actually get involved with.

If you haven't seen this....

Police pepper spray UC Davis protesters. This is absurd. This is not how we handle protest in America.

Geeks love studs

I was at a customer conference for a big Indian offshoring firm earlier this week, and Malcolm Gladwell was one of the speakers.  First, I must say that Gladwell is to be commended for taking his talk from his next book, rather than his last one, for generally putting a lot of energy into his talk, and for not using the phrase "10,000 hours of practice" once.  I'd contrast this with the spectacle of Michael Lewis, a better writer, totally dialling in his onstage talks and pulling from recent books.

However, there was an interesting moment where Gladwell started talking about reading Keith Richards's autobiography.  I don't really remember what his point about Richards was, but somewhere in there he made some point about Richards getting laid a lot and what the key was.  At the time, it didn't seem that significant.

A little bit later, Vivek Tanadive, CEO of TIBCO and a pretty good speaker himself, was holding forth on the same stage, pulling mostly from his most recent book, The Two-Second Advantage. Tanadive was talking about how complex event processing like the stuff TIBCO makes uses predictive technology in rapid iterations to model the fluid decision-making of top-performing humans. One of the examples he pulled out was some guy who's an amazing pick-up artist at bars, because he's able to anticipate how women will react to what he says.  No doubt Tanadive is trying to build an algorithm to model this.

But here's my point: here are two pretty geeky, truly brilliant guys totally gawking at the accomplishments of modern-day Lotharios on a stage in front of a thousand people.

Lets turn this around and think about if they were praising the incredible accomplishments of women who got lots of men to do the nasty with them. What would we call them? Hmmm, let me think.  Not geniuses.

The thing is, just like the Zuckerberg character in The Social Network, we're talking about geeks who just want to get some action and approval from the ladies. The real question for men who are driven to sleep with lots of women is not the how of it, but the why.

Child puking into bag at Orlando airport

8 years old, bespectacled, geeky.  As the somewhat anxious, still geeky father of a skinny, anxious geeky child, my heart goes right out.

The 80% and the 20%

After Graham's Tae Kwon Do, we met Mary at Crate and Barrel to look at some bar stools to go at the counter at our house, once it's done. There were lots of plenty affluent people there, looking to buy this that or the other. Most of them, it must be owned, belong to the 99%.

The fact of the matter is that, even if my real income has declined over the course of the crisis, even if I lost a job and moved from one region to another for somewhat if not entirely economic reasons, I am incredibly fortunate.  If I am not in the 1% by US standards, I probably am in global terms.  Not that I'm gonna go run down the numbers. I was born to the dominant ethnicity in a place that values education amongst all else, and grew up with great people.

A key problem with OWS as well as the Tea Party is that they frame the plight of the middle class as one of victimization. Ever since Rick Santelli started ranting on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade about how he didn't want to be paying other people's mortgages, the white middle class -- no doubt sick of being guilt-tripped by every other sub-segment of the population -- has been trying to make itself out to be getting screwed. Santelli didn't want to be paying other people's mortgages although, in fact, owing to the Chinese government's reluctance to let the yuan float, his own labor was in fact being subsidized by some Chinese people working at, say, Foxconn, who themselves were getting hosed, and who later found another way to express their own discontent, a la Werther.

So, though my real wages have declined over the course of the crisis and have not appreciated dramatically since over the last decade, I'm really in no position to whine since I've benefited so incredibly from where I was born and raised, from the fact that I am white, male, a WASP, and even from the course that the economy has taken over the last couple of decades (technology and finance). And ever since I started working in the private sector and earning a real wage (April, 2000), I've been astounded by how low taxes have been.

I even worked at Goldman Sachs for a little while and, though I didn't think the people there were evil, I thought that the way they lived their lives verged on it.* They work too hard, take themselves too seriously, and focus too much on money. And all across Wall Street, Manhattan, and the upper echelons of the corporate world I see much of the same.  It's not that it's necessarily evil, it's just a little repulsive.

But at the end of the day more than 1% benefit, and taxes should be higher on more than just the very rich. Not that it's all about more tax revenue. It's good to have Republicans staying vigilant on government expenditures.  "Should the government be in that business?" is an evergreen question.



*As an aside, I must say that the technology groups within Goldman that I saw are very meritocratic and ethnically diverse, with particularly strong female leadership.

Life in the Rental

Met with our general contractor about our renovation today....

Oh yeah, the renovation. Many people pepper their blogs with pictures of their renovations in progress and, truth be told, I had intended to do the same thing, but I keep forgetting. Renovating your house is, shall we say, a process, and a torturous one at that.  At the end, alluring, is the promise of moving back in to the finished process.

But I, in zen-like fashion, am firmly rooted in the moment. At times the renovation is itself a horribly distended moment, but mostly I must say I kind of like being in our little rental house. It's cozy, much smaller than the main abode.

On weekends, when we try to watch movies, with the kids' bedrooms right off the living room, Natalie sometimes complains that the TV is too loud, which is a bummer. And Mary with her interior design magazines and various and sundry house parts, and Graham with all his millions of toys and Star Wars books spread out all over the place, all that gets a little old. Not that I anticipate it will automatically fix itself in a bigger house.

But mostly it's just kind of nice to come home and be a few steps from any given family member.  Once back in the manse, we will undoubtedly disperse to our respective corners from the overwhelmingly huge open space that was once four rooms and an attic but now can only be called "the Nave."

And the rental sits up on top of a hill on a cleared lot, so when I step out the back door to grill or go get the mail or juggle the soccer ball or carry out garbage, I look up and there are the stars and the moon, which ain't bad.

Another Year

This weekend we watched Mike Leigh's most recent film, Another Year. While the film can be a bit difficult to watch as much of the screen time is occupied by a couple of alcoholics who are friends and colleagues of the protagonists, one of whom is pretty much an open and bottomless wound, it is, in the end, a Mike Leigh film, which is a good thing.  Leigh has a vision which is infinitely more human than most of the rest of the directors over the course of cinema history, and all he cares about is people.

And it is, moreover, a film warmed by the presence of Jim Broadbent, who is really one of the great actors of our time.  It wasn't until I looked at his IMDB page that I realized just how omnipresent the guy is, he's really the Morgan Freeman of Great Britain, the moral center so many directors call on.  And apparently he's done 7 films with Mike Leigh, and I haven't seen all of them.  I'll be fixing that.

This weekend's viewing

Finished up City Island, with Andy Garcia. A nice little movie, very much worth seeing, like a younger and less ambitious cousin of Moonstruck.

Then we watched In the Loop, with James Galdofini and a bunch of foul-mouthed Brits.  Extremely funny and cynical, though it putters into an anti-climactic end.  Still, well worth seeing.

Pigs

Flying from Ft Lauderdale to Charlotte last night, a couple got into the two seats between me and the window.  He had on a Guns and Roses like bandana, with long hair, with his head shaved up under his ears and some patchy jeans. I started talking to them, and it turns out they were down in Florida getting married.  Alone.  Without family, on purpose.  Stayed in some luxury time share on Fisher's Island near Palm Beach.

Turns out, they needed time alone.  They had 5 kids between em, 3 from previous marriages and a couple of their own.  Both were in college, and he had two jobs.  One of them, it turns out, was in a slaughterhouse, slaughtering 1300 pigs a day.  And he gave me a fair amount of detail around the processes involved in killing them, which.... I will spare you. It made me think about vegetarianism, but when he hit the ground he was intent on finding some bbq (and rightly so, though the slaw down in that part of the state kind of sucks).  I think he wanted to fuck with me a little bit (and he did).

And between the five kids and two jobs, he had found time to master Angry Birds, to get up to levels Graham and I have never dreamed of.  A very sweet guy.  Spent a lot of time looking through his wedding pix (they were both in white) on his computer and declaring that this one or that one is the best.

Businessweek

I never thought an issue of Businessweek would make me cry, but here comes this week's with a picture of Steve Jobs on the cover, and I'm thinking:  oh, here's Businessweek's tribute issue.  So I start thumbing through it and see, in fact, that it's something more than that.  It's all about Jobs and Apple, every page, and there only appears to be one advertiser, and you can guess who it is.  20 consecutive pages of pictures of Steve and people around the world with Apple products, with quotes from Steve about life and death superimposed on them.  No logos.

It is, in short, a little breathtaking.  I'll read the articles later.

And keep in mind that I'm not even really an Apple fan. I'm writing this on a wintel machine, have an Android phone, mostly use my iPad (which I got for free) as a reading device.

Went back and read the articles, and they didn't add a ton to what I had read earlier in other places, but I did read it all.  Jobs was a compelling figure.

The New Yorker for the iPad

Is ridiculously large.  This week's is 186 megs.  The whole iPad stores 12 or 16 gigs.  Unless I'm mistaken, the New Yorker could theoretically max the thing out in a little over a year.  Absurd.  Nobody needs the ads to be this freaking hi-res.

Occupy Together

I really need to do some work tonight, but I keep coming home and getting sucked into reading about the Occupation, because, yes, it's important. If you haven't read Naomi Klein's speech from Zuccotti Square, do.

OccupyTogether is also impressive.

I have outlined some of my misgivings about the Occupation, but, while everything they say is not right, and they don't have all the answers, in essence they are not wrong.