I am driving a car with a hundred thousand miles on it. I happen to like it and take pretty good care of it. It's one of those 4-cylinder ugly-cute hybrids that the Japanese seem so good at making, and you can pretend it's an SUV on some days but you don't have to pay for all the gas you'd need if you had the real thing.
One day I thought I'd see about getting a sedan from the same company--I like sedans, too, and I like it when they are pretty sleek and pretty good on gas. So I went to a dealer whose name seemed to profess a propensity for being Friendly, not expecting them to be anything but ordinary and somewhat on the slimy side.
I came away with my convictions intact: I find it hard to believe that anyone can stomach the purchase of a new car except very rarely or when one really needs to do so.
Of course, I started my research on-line and found out that leases were going off at two-twenty nine a month and that my car had a blue-book value of around sixty-five hundred bucks. The amount owed to the bank was a little less than that amount. Perhaps perversely, I wanted them to take my car instead of the up-front fees they usually ask for (a couple of grand) to get the lease started.
Maybe this is what doomed the transaction from the start. But I got the distinct impression that the dealership expected to relieve me of my vehicle for considerably less than it was worth, sell it for considerably more than it was worth, and still make me pay full freight on the lease. Why not?
The offense is in the way this transparent unfairness is often tricked up by car dealers. I think they believe their customers must be idiots (because buying a new car is inherently stupid?--I don't know).
It started with the salesperson telling me that a certain "he" had said my perfectly presentable car was "in rough shape" and that they couldn't come anywhere near blue-book. When I pointed out the difference in dollars and cents, I was told that "he" would not "insult me" with an offer that approached the blue-book value. Also, that the blue-book "didn't really follow the market", which was an amazing thing to say about the industry-standard price guide.
I figured this combination of reverse terminology and outright denial of fact must be part of the not-so-subtle bag of tricks the salesperson deploys to confuse the buyer. It confused me, but only in the sense that I wasn't sure if it was a trick or if the salesperson might be running low on batteries somehow. The resultant lease offer was fully more than a hundred dollars a month more than my research had suggested it might cost (and what the company's national advertising campaign proclaimed).
Then came the math part. "Even if I could get you another thousand" on the car, it would only bring the price down by thirty dollars. On the other hand, if I paid them two thousand up front, the price would come down by at least a hundred dollars--a three-to-one ratio in their favor.
I asked what happened to the two-twenty-nine, since we weren't even close. "Where did you see that?" It was as if I had brought in a dead rat and had asked to have it appraised. That it had been seen in a "national advertising campaign" was treated as if it had been transmitted to me by aliens in a heiroglyph unreadable in the car-dealership domain.
This led me to the conclusion that they had no need to sell a car to me, and I shook hands with their salesperson and left.
I may hang on to my car for another hundred thousand miles. It may be less insulting to my pride to drive around in a dented old rustbucket than to feel the chill of car-dealer slime applied liberally about my head and shoulders any time soon.
So my question remains: how can anyone put up with it? No other type of transaction is ever as rife with chicanery. How do they sell even a single car except to the careless, desperate or innocent? I will continue to ponder.
--Renaissance
Monday, August 24, 2009
Howard Stern: What a Chump!
Remember "The King of All Media" with his easy sneer and his Quivering sidekick, making fun of big boobs and retards and minorities and talking about dicks and farts and occasionally about politics as if anyone cared what he thought about anything but the way he described the nether cheeks of any of a dozen visiting whores and cum-bunnies?
Remember how he was always picking on the easiest targets, and how he always got away with sneering at people who were truly different by hiding behind his self-professed ugliness, gratuitously his Jewishness, and the platitudinous Negritude of his helpmate?
Remember how he seemed to be the voice of every teen boy and undersexed twenty and thirty something male in the whole wide universe? How he made it seem, if you squinted hard (really, really hard), that it might be cool to be a wisecracking nobody with no friends and nothing better to do than snarl and chuckle and hope that some chick will do something dirty for you without you having to pay?
Remember his front-page battles with the mean-old government that wanted to keep him from cursing on-air? And then how he figured he'd get the last laugh by doing his show the way he'd always wanted to do it? On satellite radio? With, like, twelve people listening?
Well, I am sure he's sulking all the way to the mouse-click that shows him his hefty bank balance, but can it really be the case that in a very short time indeed, he has become totally, utterly, incontrovertibly irrelevant?
When was the last time you heard anyone--I mean anyone at all--mention good old Howard Stern? Does he still have a show on satellite radio? Is there such a thing as satellite radio anymore?
Isn't it wonderful how the world's biggest jackasses so often end up tripping over their own big floppy egos and landing face down in a lonesome puddle at the end of the field where nobody's watching anymore?
If only Rush Limbowel would go where Stern went. But he's never made the mistake of overestimating his viewers. He knows they wouldn't bother to buy into some cockamaimie monthly service plan just to hear his drivel.
Poor Howard. Where do you suppose he stands on the Health Care issue? I'm sure he'd think of something dirty to say about it. But it's too late. Nobody cares what he says. Not one person.
--Renaissance
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Remember how he was always picking on the easiest targets, and how he always got away with sneering at people who were truly different by hiding behind his self-professed ugliness, gratuitously his Jewishness, and the platitudinous Negritude of his helpmate?
Remember how he seemed to be the voice of every teen boy and undersexed twenty and thirty something male in the whole wide universe? How he made it seem, if you squinted hard (really, really hard), that it might be cool to be a wisecracking nobody with no friends and nothing better to do than snarl and chuckle and hope that some chick will do something dirty for you without you having to pay?
Remember his front-page battles with the mean-old government that wanted to keep him from cursing on-air? And then how he figured he'd get the last laugh by doing his show the way he'd always wanted to do it? On satellite radio? With, like, twelve people listening?
Well, I am sure he's sulking all the way to the mouse-click that shows him his hefty bank balance, but can it really be the case that in a very short time indeed, he has become totally, utterly, incontrovertibly irrelevant?
When was the last time you heard anyone--I mean anyone at all--mention good old Howard Stern? Does he still have a show on satellite radio? Is there such a thing as satellite radio anymore?
Isn't it wonderful how the world's biggest jackasses so often end up tripping over their own big floppy egos and landing face down in a lonesome puddle at the end of the field where nobody's watching anymore?
If only Rush Limbowel would go where Stern went. But he's never made the mistake of overestimating his viewers. He knows they wouldn't bother to buy into some cockamaimie monthly service plan just to hear his drivel.
Poor Howard. Where do you suppose he stands on the Health Care issue? I'm sure he'd think of something dirty to say about it. But it's too late. Nobody cares what he says. Not one person.
--Renaissance
Thursday, August 20, 2009
In Support of Poets
I am in full agreement with the economic analysis put forth in the most recent All Poets Are Thieves posting.
I moved to Manhattan when no one (apparently) wanted to be here and got an admittedly rather crummy apartment for a hundred and fifty dollars a month. If that same apartment today were not ten times as expensive--maybe more--I would be shocked.
Today, the notion that one is young, ambitious, creative and pretty broke yet able to find a home in the canyons of the great City of Dreams, is chimerical. Even as rents fall by fifteen and twenty percent (at most), the city, and especially Manhattan, is still held in a white-knuckled grip by landlords (and co-op owners and condo-owners to a lesser extent)who seek crazily to drive every penny of profit out of each and every livable space between the Battery and Spuyten Duyvil (and beyond).
This did not happen in a vacuum. Certain large areas of Manhattan were, for a long enough time, a bargain for the creative minds that powered it--until there were enough of them to crowd out the junkies, thieves, creeps, drunks and filthy whackos that used to lard the populace and help keep the whole place somewhat on edge and somewhat undesirable to those seeking a proper, hassle-free lifestyle. Many of those who arrived as broke creatives became loft-owners and wanted nothing less than a hassle-free lifestyle and then fully supported the various crackdowns and price-runs that eventually created a city that now resembles the city of old only in its pace and its linear height.
So many of the old charms (yes, charms) of Manhattan are now gone. Small, cranky shops that could be found nowhere else are now nowhere to be found. Does anyone remember places like Magickal Childe where you could buy henbane and skulls, or 13th Street Lumber where you could buy pieces of wood small enough to carry home yourself? One could go on--the loss of diners, the loss of bookstores, the loss of non-chain-store coffee shops, the loss of cheap junk shops with really cool stuff in them--in essence, the loss of uniqueness that made Manhattan a place where one could manage to live well and cheaply and just beyond the clutches of landowners and great corporations that had moved to the suburbs.
Manhattan today, even as it suffers a severe economic downturn, is no place for the young dreamer of little means. Today's rag-tag dreamer has become a victim of a previous generation of dreamers' success. This is terribly sad. But young dreamers will find their own places--some have gone to the Hudson Valley for instance, and some to still-marginal sections of the boroughs (not including Williamsburgh which is well-trodden and unjustifiably expensive). Manhattan will be the richer, but also much the poorer--and certainly far, far less interesting.
--Renaissance
Friday, August 14, 2009
I moved to Manhattan when no one (apparently) wanted to be here and got an admittedly rather crummy apartment for a hundred and fifty dollars a month. If that same apartment today were not ten times as expensive--maybe more--I would be shocked.
Today, the notion that one is young, ambitious, creative and pretty broke yet able to find a home in the canyons of the great City of Dreams, is chimerical. Even as rents fall by fifteen and twenty percent (at most), the city, and especially Manhattan, is still held in a white-knuckled grip by landlords (and co-op owners and condo-owners to a lesser extent)who seek crazily to drive every penny of profit out of each and every livable space between the Battery and Spuyten Duyvil (and beyond).
This did not happen in a vacuum. Certain large areas of Manhattan were, for a long enough time, a bargain for the creative minds that powered it--until there were enough of them to crowd out the junkies, thieves, creeps, drunks and filthy whackos that used to lard the populace and help keep the whole place somewhat on edge and somewhat undesirable to those seeking a proper, hassle-free lifestyle. Many of those who arrived as broke creatives became loft-owners and wanted nothing less than a hassle-free lifestyle and then fully supported the various crackdowns and price-runs that eventually created a city that now resembles the city of old only in its pace and its linear height.
So many of the old charms (yes, charms) of Manhattan are now gone. Small, cranky shops that could be found nowhere else are now nowhere to be found. Does anyone remember places like Magickal Childe where you could buy henbane and skulls, or 13th Street Lumber where you could buy pieces of wood small enough to carry home yourself? One could go on--the loss of diners, the loss of bookstores, the loss of non-chain-store coffee shops, the loss of cheap junk shops with really cool stuff in them--in essence, the loss of uniqueness that made Manhattan a place where one could manage to live well and cheaply and just beyond the clutches of landowners and great corporations that had moved to the suburbs.
Manhattan today, even as it suffers a severe economic downturn, is no place for the young dreamer of little means. Today's rag-tag dreamer has become a victim of a previous generation of dreamers' success. This is terribly sad. But young dreamers will find their own places--some have gone to the Hudson Valley for instance, and some to still-marginal sections of the boroughs (not including Williamsburgh which is well-trodden and unjustifiably expensive). Manhattan will be the richer, but also much the poorer--and certainly far, far less interesting.
--Renaissance
Friday, August 14, 2009
The Abject Failure of Existing Government Health Care
We know it mostly as "Medicare" and it's for old folks. It doesn't cost anything. It's run by the government. By all accounts, it is a 100% failure.
In fact, by every account I know of, it is universally lethal. Have you heard of any old person ever having survived the onslaught of Medicare's pill-slinging, hipbone-setting, cardiac-massaging minions? Of course not. Every single old person under its care ends up dying. This is a great tragedy--an American holocaust. But of course no one--not even anti-government teabaggers--dares talk about it. This is because everyone knows that one day, they too will end up in the deadly clutches of Medicare. Evidently they are hoping their silence will buy them an extra few years before, in its mysterious, inexorable way, Medicare oversees their death.
The worst part of Medicare is that everyone gets it. If you were poor and uninsured at 64, you are, when you turn 65, still poor but also in the deadly grip of Medicare. And you have no hope of survival. Seniors, frightened and intimidated by the certain death awaiting them at the hands of Medicare, say nothing. The quietest among them accept the care for many years--and survive sometimes to celebrate their one hundredth birthday. But no one survives much past their centenary.
Who knows how long seniors might live without this deadly government program? A hundred and ten? A hundred and twenty-five? A hundred and seventy-five? Five hundred? Have we no right to find out? Of course not. The government has made certain there are no survivors.
Take heed, America. The silent acceptance of Medicare by seniors is evidence enough. They are too frightened to tell you what it's like to have free medical care from the government--too scared to tell you that it will eventually kill you.
--Renaissance
Saturday, August 01, 2009
In fact, by every account I know of, it is universally lethal. Have you heard of any old person ever having survived the onslaught of Medicare's pill-slinging, hipbone-setting, cardiac-massaging minions? Of course not. Every single old person under its care ends up dying. This is a great tragedy--an American holocaust. But of course no one--not even anti-government teabaggers--dares talk about it. This is because everyone knows that one day, they too will end up in the deadly clutches of Medicare. Evidently they are hoping their silence will buy them an extra few years before, in its mysterious, inexorable way, Medicare oversees their death.
The worst part of Medicare is that everyone gets it. If you were poor and uninsured at 64, you are, when you turn 65, still poor but also in the deadly grip of Medicare. And you have no hope of survival. Seniors, frightened and intimidated by the certain death awaiting them at the hands of Medicare, say nothing. The quietest among them accept the care for many years--and survive sometimes to celebrate their one hundredth birthday. But no one survives much past their centenary.
Who knows how long seniors might live without this deadly government program? A hundred and ten? A hundred and twenty-five? A hundred and seventy-five? Five hundred? Have we no right to find out? Of course not. The government has made certain there are no survivors.
Take heed, America. The silent acceptance of Medicare by seniors is evidence enough. They are too frightened to tell you what it's like to have free medical care from the government--too scared to tell you that it will eventually kill you.
--Renaissance
Saturday, August 01, 2009
If I were in My Home and. . .
If I were in my home and, having shown I.D. to a policeman or woman proving I lived there and was not wanted on an outstanding charge, I would expect them to leave on the double and issue a public servant-like apology for having wasted my time. I would expect to accept their apology, but, while it might be nice of me to be nice about it, I would be under no legal restraint to keep my mouth shut in any way, shape or form.
Of course the charges were dropped (in Cambridge, against Professor Gates, if you have been skindiving in Tuvalu for the past week)! "The Cambridge Police acted stupidly". Obama got it right the first time (he usually does).
This may be about race as much as anything else, but to me it is more about a citizen's constitutional right to privacy and the limits of police power.
The police were right in investigating the 911 call. As a citizen, I would want them to respond to a possible break-in at my home. That said, the citizen is under no obligation to be polite in his/her own home in order to avoid arrest. This is where the cops got stupid.
Of course Gates was unwise to have been shouting at the police. Of course the police account is at odds with the facts in a manner supporting police rectitude. These are human beings looking out for themselves.
But here we must stand fast against an obvious tramping upon a citizen's right to privacy. A policeman no longer in pursuit of a criminal on private property has no reason to be present upon said private property. Much less should he/she have an expectation that the citizen owes him/her some sort of "respect" or even "politeness". And especially not so as to avoid arrest.
The notion that the Cambridge police felt endangered by Gates in a manner requiring the application of handcuffs, or that there was "tumultuous behavior in a public space" beggars belief. Once the cops had seen his ID as proof of residence, it was time to go--with a handshake or under a hail of invective. The citizen in the case had no responsibility to politeness towards anyone, and that included the police.
Anyone dragged out of their own house in handcuffs having done nothing but perhaps yell at a cop has a right to be awfully annoyed. I am bound to wonder what will come out of Obama's post-racial cocktail party--I hope it includes an admission from the cop that he really ought'n't've arrested the guy.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Of course the charges were dropped (in Cambridge, against Professor Gates, if you have been skindiving in Tuvalu for the past week)! "The Cambridge Police acted stupidly". Obama got it right the first time (he usually does).
This may be about race as much as anything else, but to me it is more about a citizen's constitutional right to privacy and the limits of police power.
The police were right in investigating the 911 call. As a citizen, I would want them to respond to a possible break-in at my home. That said, the citizen is under no obligation to be polite in his/her own home in order to avoid arrest. This is where the cops got stupid.
Of course Gates was unwise to have been shouting at the police. Of course the police account is at odds with the facts in a manner supporting police rectitude. These are human beings looking out for themselves.
But here we must stand fast against an obvious tramping upon a citizen's right to privacy. A policeman no longer in pursuit of a criminal on private property has no reason to be present upon said private property. Much less should he/she have an expectation that the citizen owes him/her some sort of "respect" or even "politeness". And especially not so as to avoid arrest.
The notion that the Cambridge police felt endangered by Gates in a manner requiring the application of handcuffs, or that there was "tumultuous behavior in a public space" beggars belief. Once the cops had seen his ID as proof of residence, it was time to go--with a handshake or under a hail of invective. The citizen in the case had no responsibility to politeness towards anyone, and that included the police.
Anyone dragged out of their own house in handcuffs having done nothing but perhaps yell at a cop has a right to be awfully annoyed. I am bound to wonder what will come out of Obama's post-racial cocktail party--I hope it includes an admission from the cop that he really ought'n't've arrested the guy.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
My Favorite Stationery Store
That's right, it's spelled with an "e". How many times have you seen that word spelled with an "a" as if it were describing something that is remaining in the same place? These days, probably more often than not.
But a stationery store, while usually stationary, is spelled with an "e", and in a world of Staples and Office World and of course Wal Mart, the stationery store often goes the way of the passenger pigeon.
I do, however, know of one that has managed to outlast the local Staples in Midtown Manhattan. It's on 47th Street and I don't know its name and it is run by a couple of argumentative Orthodox Jews, an African American man who seems to be the one who keeps the place running, and a near-deaf old woman probably the mother of one or both of the argumentative bosses. They keep the place a dreadful mess and the farther back into the store you go, the less you feel like you're in a store but more like you're in an egregiously disorganized back room filled with cardboard and old sandwiches. They write orders out on paper--carbon copy provided. They have a guy who "runs things over to Morrie" or whomever. Their pen collection is tired and dusty. They have odd things on the shelves, like white-out tape, that it seems no one has asked for since the mid nineteen-eighties.
And yet, and yet: they seem to maintain a thriving business. People are always coming in for reams of paper and paper clips and weird pen refills that are no longer manufactured. If you want something, you ask for it (like the old days) and they shuffle back into the dim recesses of the store, or they shove around some boxes under the counter and they get it for you. None of this "self-service" stuff at this place. They sell some up-to-date stuff too--lots of Moleskine notebooks. You can pick these out yourself. But most important, they have outlasted the local Staples.
In a previous post I had made note of how moms and pops fail in the face of the big boxes because they often have a poor attitude and don't seem happy to help. These guys have a swagger, but it's pride of place, and of the certain knowledge that whatever it is you want, they have it somewhere in that unholy mess and will excavate it for you and you will buy it. I've never bothered to compare their prices but I don't think they are the cheapest place in town.
There used to be so many shops like this in New York. Maybe everywhere. This one is hanging in there. I give them business whenever I can, even if the boxes are dented and the pens have to be wiped off before using them.
Staples closed up about a month ago.
--Renaissance
Thursday, July 16, 2009
But a stationery store, while usually stationary, is spelled with an "e", and in a world of Staples and Office World and of course Wal Mart, the stationery store often goes the way of the passenger pigeon.
I do, however, know of one that has managed to outlast the local Staples in Midtown Manhattan. It's on 47th Street and I don't know its name and it is run by a couple of argumentative Orthodox Jews, an African American man who seems to be the one who keeps the place running, and a near-deaf old woman probably the mother of one or both of the argumentative bosses. They keep the place a dreadful mess and the farther back into the store you go, the less you feel like you're in a store but more like you're in an egregiously disorganized back room filled with cardboard and old sandwiches. They write orders out on paper--carbon copy provided. They have a guy who "runs things over to Morrie" or whomever. Their pen collection is tired and dusty. They have odd things on the shelves, like white-out tape, that it seems no one has asked for since the mid nineteen-eighties.
And yet, and yet: they seem to maintain a thriving business. People are always coming in for reams of paper and paper clips and weird pen refills that are no longer manufactured. If you want something, you ask for it (like the old days) and they shuffle back into the dim recesses of the store, or they shove around some boxes under the counter and they get it for you. None of this "self-service" stuff at this place. They sell some up-to-date stuff too--lots of Moleskine notebooks. You can pick these out yourself. But most important, they have outlasted the local Staples.
In a previous post I had made note of how moms and pops fail in the face of the big boxes because they often have a poor attitude and don't seem happy to help. These guys have a swagger, but it's pride of place, and of the certain knowledge that whatever it is you want, they have it somewhere in that unholy mess and will excavate it for you and you will buy it. I've never bothered to compare their prices but I don't think they are the cheapest place in town.
There used to be so many shops like this in New York. Maybe everywhere. This one is hanging in there. I give them business whenever I can, even if the boxes are dented and the pens have to be wiped off before using them.
Staples closed up about a month ago.
--Renaissance
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Another Crank Complaint About a Common American Pastime
This time it's the ubiquitous practice known as "running"; and perhaps more in general, "exercise".
Like the moon-shots, this American obsession with fitness began with that well-known gymnast (at least between the sheets), JFK--who was, as the cognoscenti know, usually in severe pain due to this back, and on a frightening amount of drugs that helped him overcome a debilitating case of Addison's disease, and who was often too sick to get out of bed for weeks at a time. Perhaps it was this personal dichotomy--his severe illness coupled with his at-the-time successful projection of a youthful vitality--that drove him to promote personal vigor and especially exercise as almost a patriotic duty.
What I am almost certain will make my post seem especially perverse is the raw numbers of the obviously unfit in our nation, the one-hundred million-man/woman Army of obesity thundering around our big-box stores (or gliding in self-propelled I'm-too-fat-to-walk buggies).
I am not talking about them. They are, for the most part, beyond the help that even moderate exercise might bring. What they really need to do is just stop stuffing their pie-holes. But that is another post.
I am talking about the so-called "fit" and also the hopefully fit. Let me be clear: I hate running and other forms of exercise. I dislike them because they seem so pointless. Where am I running from/to? Why all the huffing and puffing (I have thought while on an exercise bike--an occurrence I admit is rare as a butterfly at Christmas). I seem to have no purpose other than a purely selfish one: make me thinner (for the record, the writer is somewhat overweight but not, I like to believe, anything like nearly obese).
So here is my complaint and it's more or less one of morals, or of social responsibility at least: if all of the runners and spinners and lifters have so much energy to burn, how about doing something constructive? There are lots of meals to be lifted to the hungry; plots to be dug on weekends for affordable housing; assistance needed for the straw-limbed who really cannot walk; children to be carried at hospices. You get the idea.
Or how about a proposal that would seem to satisfy so many if it could be implemented: why not pass a law (in NYC for example) that all exercise machines, especially those that don't pull electricity, must be hooked up to the electrical grid in order to generate energy. What if a runner could (voluntarily) strap on a belt that would transform the running motion into energy stored in a battery that could then be used at home to recharge cameras, ipods, robot vacuum cleaners and so much more?
Maybe then I would feel that all this running and spinning and in-place-jogging-while-watching-CNBC-while-listening-to the Black Eyed Peas weren't anything more than a madness born of self-absorption, vanity and a nitwit hunger to waste one's energetic years in pointless, repetitive motion.
--Renaissance
Monday, July 13, 2009
Like the moon-shots, this American obsession with fitness began with that well-known gymnast (at least between the sheets), JFK--who was, as the cognoscenti know, usually in severe pain due to this back, and on a frightening amount of drugs that helped him overcome a debilitating case of Addison's disease, and who was often too sick to get out of bed for weeks at a time. Perhaps it was this personal dichotomy--his severe illness coupled with his at-the-time successful projection of a youthful vitality--that drove him to promote personal vigor and especially exercise as almost a patriotic duty.
What I am almost certain will make my post seem especially perverse is the raw numbers of the obviously unfit in our nation, the one-hundred million-man/woman Army of obesity thundering around our big-box stores (or gliding in self-propelled I'm-too-fat-to-walk buggies).
I am not talking about them. They are, for the most part, beyond the help that even moderate exercise might bring. What they really need to do is just stop stuffing their pie-holes. But that is another post.
I am talking about the so-called "fit" and also the hopefully fit. Let me be clear: I hate running and other forms of exercise. I dislike them because they seem so pointless. Where am I running from/to? Why all the huffing and puffing (I have thought while on an exercise bike--an occurrence I admit is rare as a butterfly at Christmas). I seem to have no purpose other than a purely selfish one: make me thinner (for the record, the writer is somewhat overweight but not, I like to believe, anything like nearly obese).
So here is my complaint and it's more or less one of morals, or of social responsibility at least: if all of the runners and spinners and lifters have so much energy to burn, how about doing something constructive? There are lots of meals to be lifted to the hungry; plots to be dug on weekends for affordable housing; assistance needed for the straw-limbed who really cannot walk; children to be carried at hospices. You get the idea.
Or how about a proposal that would seem to satisfy so many if it could be implemented: why not pass a law (in NYC for example) that all exercise machines, especially those that don't pull electricity, must be hooked up to the electrical grid in order to generate energy. What if a runner could (voluntarily) strap on a belt that would transform the running motion into energy stored in a battery that could then be used at home to recharge cameras, ipods, robot vacuum cleaners and so much more?
Maybe then I would feel that all this running and spinning and in-place-jogging-while-watching-CNBC-while-listening-to the Black Eyed Peas weren't anything more than a madness born of self-absorption, vanity and a nitwit hunger to waste one's energetic years in pointless, repetitive motion.
--Renaissance
Monday, July 13, 2009
Karl Malden, one of the Best
In downtown LA they were celebrating the life (the good parts) of Michael Jackson; meanwhile reports said the coroner still had his brain, and there was no plan to bury the body. His death certificate did not say how he died.
In another part of the world, a man of 97 years passed away leaving a long legacy of great cinematic performances. His name was Karl Malden.
He was the priest in On the Waterfront. The well-meaning schlub in Streetcar Named Desire. The nemesis in One-Eyed Jacks. In each, he played against another great actor named Marlon Brando and because he was so different from the brooding Brando, because his face with its large, off-center nose and his piercing, searching eyes and his ability to be both unassuming, honest, threatening and familiar all at once, he never seemed to be in Brando's shadow, but fighting right alongside as an equal.
He didn't have a wealth of sex appeal (I don't think). But he had enormous appeal as a regular guy, a smart guy, a tough guy. You didn't mess with a Karl Malden. You figured you could kid with him for as long as you wanted, but if he got tired of you, he might easily kick your ass and not feel guilty about it.
Karl Malden played cops and priests and truckers and cowpokes and detectives and was the everyman every man could aspire to be--he not only had plenty of self-respect, but he commanded respect.
I confess I had no idea he was still with us when he died. 97 is pretty old. My guess is he had a pretty good life. I know of no scandal, ever, involving Karl Malden.
Good-bye, Karl Malden. You were one of the best in your profession during the golden era of movies between World War Two and the resignation of Richard Nixon. I am sure you've already got a star on Hollywood Boulevard. One hopes they have recently applied to it some extra polish.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
In another part of the world, a man of 97 years passed away leaving a long legacy of great cinematic performances. His name was Karl Malden.
He was the priest in On the Waterfront. The well-meaning schlub in Streetcar Named Desire. The nemesis in One-Eyed Jacks. In each, he played against another great actor named Marlon Brando and because he was so different from the brooding Brando, because his face with its large, off-center nose and his piercing, searching eyes and his ability to be both unassuming, honest, threatening and familiar all at once, he never seemed to be in Brando's shadow, but fighting right alongside as an equal.
He didn't have a wealth of sex appeal (I don't think). But he had enormous appeal as a regular guy, a smart guy, a tough guy. You didn't mess with a Karl Malden. You figured you could kid with him for as long as you wanted, but if he got tired of you, he might easily kick your ass and not feel guilty about it.
Karl Malden played cops and priests and truckers and cowpokes and detectives and was the everyman every man could aspire to be--he not only had plenty of self-respect, but he commanded respect.
I confess I had no idea he was still with us when he died. 97 is pretty old. My guess is he had a pretty good life. I know of no scandal, ever, involving Karl Malden.
Good-bye, Karl Malden. You were one of the best in your profession during the golden era of movies between World War Two and the resignation of Richard Nixon. I am sure you've already got a star on Hollywood Boulevard. One hopes they have recently applied to it some extra polish.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Witness to an Economic MegaTrend?
The theory I will put forth in this post will be highly unscientific in that its data points are truly minimal and entirely personal. But two experiences--one in 1975 and one yesterday--have made me wonder if we have not come to the end of an age.
The age I am talking about is the one where bad old times are put to rest, the value of nearly everything rises, and those who have made the right moves will have profited handsomely, especially in real estate. Moreover, the age I am talking about does not just encompass the recent bubble but goes back much, much farther than that--to a time when derelict housing was "rediscovered", brought back to life, and certain of our American downtowns resurrected from the ashes in which post-war, suburban flight had left them.
First let me digress to say that I believe the suburbs are doomed as a way of life and that this will only become apparent as gas prices permanently exceed $5.00 per gallon within the next five years. But that is another story.
In 1975 I was young and out of work in Portland, Oregon where Victorian houses could be had for a song (but more of a song than I had in my pocket). Having found work at a cunning sandwich shop run by a gay couple, I later found work helping their friends clean up hulking old relics that had been inhabited by shut-ins and old ladies for decades, that they had bought with a small portion of their savings, and would soon fix up and become the harbingers of a nationwide trend of spontaneous urban reclamation. One of them, William Jamison, was so successful that, after he died of AIDS, they put up a park to honor him in the Northwest Portland neighborhood he helped revive.
The rest of the country followed suit. Where, except for the most neglected regions, have we not seen smart people take old forgotten houses and remake them into modern success stories (and see their real-estate value quintuple or do even better than that)?
A riverside town in upstate New York--which I sometimes visit--gives me the coda to my story. I happened to notice a yard sale that looked more interesting than most, as it was in front of a Victorian-style house that had obviously been reclaimed in typical fashion. I encountered the owner, an older gay man in high-heeled cowboy boots selling everything he owned because he had lost his antique business ("no market! burn it all! a dollar a pound!"), lost his lover to AIDS and now was in foreclosure. He said that the mortgage was $360K, he cannot make the payments, is being offered $275K for the house and can't take it; and that three years ago someone offered him a million dollars for the house and he did not take it then either, believing it would continue to increase in value. He claimed he would soon be homeless. I cannot claim I did anything heroic. I bought a doorknob and left.
But I left thinking that I had seen the opposite side of the curve of a megatrend in values. Let us suggest that the last "oil crisis" and the resignation of Nixon was a former low-point for this country in terms of value (and I can prove the undervalued nature of things at that time by pointing out that I signed a Manhattan apartment lease for $150 dollars a month in 1978). And so after almost forty years of rising values for things like housing and antiques and art and stocks and bonds and automobile industries, now the same types of people who were early in the real estate market and leading the way to rediscovery of our undervalued treasures (these were, and have long been mainly gay men), now are selling off everything they own at firesale prices or worse, and being thrown into the street.
Maybe it was just a chance encounter and without much meaning. But there are an awful lot of shut-up storefronts around; in small downtowns, at megamalls, on Fifth Avenue; and I begin to wonder what is going to replace those stores, those jobs, those livelihoods in a society that had become almost fatally overavalued and overbuilt.
--Renaissance
Saturday, July 04, 2009
The age I am talking about is the one where bad old times are put to rest, the value of nearly everything rises, and those who have made the right moves will have profited handsomely, especially in real estate. Moreover, the age I am talking about does not just encompass the recent bubble but goes back much, much farther than that--to a time when derelict housing was "rediscovered", brought back to life, and certain of our American downtowns resurrected from the ashes in which post-war, suburban flight had left them.
First let me digress to say that I believe the suburbs are doomed as a way of life and that this will only become apparent as gas prices permanently exceed $5.00 per gallon within the next five years. But that is another story.
In 1975 I was young and out of work in Portland, Oregon where Victorian houses could be had for a song (but more of a song than I had in my pocket). Having found work at a cunning sandwich shop run by a gay couple, I later found work helping their friends clean up hulking old relics that had been inhabited by shut-ins and old ladies for decades, that they had bought with a small portion of their savings, and would soon fix up and become the harbingers of a nationwide trend of spontaneous urban reclamation. One of them, William Jamison, was so successful that, after he died of AIDS, they put up a park to honor him in the Northwest Portland neighborhood he helped revive.
The rest of the country followed suit. Where, except for the most neglected regions, have we not seen smart people take old forgotten houses and remake them into modern success stories (and see their real-estate value quintuple or do even better than that)?
A riverside town in upstate New York--which I sometimes visit--gives me the coda to my story. I happened to notice a yard sale that looked more interesting than most, as it was in front of a Victorian-style house that had obviously been reclaimed in typical fashion. I encountered the owner, an older gay man in high-heeled cowboy boots selling everything he owned because he had lost his antique business ("no market! burn it all! a dollar a pound!"), lost his lover to AIDS and now was in foreclosure. He said that the mortgage was $360K, he cannot make the payments, is being offered $275K for the house and can't take it; and that three years ago someone offered him a million dollars for the house and he did not take it then either, believing it would continue to increase in value. He claimed he would soon be homeless. I cannot claim I did anything heroic. I bought a doorknob and left.
But I left thinking that I had seen the opposite side of the curve of a megatrend in values. Let us suggest that the last "oil crisis" and the resignation of Nixon was a former low-point for this country in terms of value (and I can prove the undervalued nature of things at that time by pointing out that I signed a Manhattan apartment lease for $150 dollars a month in 1978). And so after almost forty years of rising values for things like housing and antiques and art and stocks and bonds and automobile industries, now the same types of people who were early in the real estate market and leading the way to rediscovery of our undervalued treasures (these were, and have long been mainly gay men), now are selling off everything they own at firesale prices or worse, and being thrown into the street.
Maybe it was just a chance encounter and without much meaning. But there are an awful lot of shut-up storefronts around; in small downtowns, at megamalls, on Fifth Avenue; and I begin to wonder what is going to replace those stores, those jobs, those livelihoods in a society that had become almost fatally overavalued and overbuilt.
--Renaissance
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Tread Lightly as the Gloved One Departs
A thin, not to say skeletal figure lay wound in a white sheet, transferred from helicopter to white van on the roof of a medical center in Los Angeles. As always when big news happens in that city, the main visual feed is itself by helicopter. There is an eerie feeling imparted by the drift, silence and weightlessness of these helicopter feeds. But in this case, the eerie nature of the affair was extraordinary in its own right.
Those who have been tramping through the Amazon or lost on the wrong side of an Antarcitic mountain may not know, but the rest of us know that Michael Jackson is dead at 50. I will bet dollars to doughnuts he was badly overmedicated and that his handlers, especially those with trunks full of pills, will have much to answer for in the coming months.
In fairness to my own musical taste, I must state up front that, no matter how sad or how evocative I might find his passing, his music never worked for me even a little bit. I found it strangely cold and unappealing despite my acknowledgement of its technical mastery. The same for his dancing: wonderful in its way, but robotic, alienating, icy. The school of dancing characterized by many dancers simultaneously making the same elaborate, jerky movements has always struck me as not a little fascistic (and clearly militaristic) in nature.
He presented, more than anything else in the past decade, a figure twisted by multiple, compounded tragedies. His horrid visage, his trysts with children, his queer amusement-park "ranch", his bizarre liaisons with the mothers of the children of which he had custody (not his biologically), his obvious financial and physical frailty, his long train of lawsuits and his multitudinous retinue of handlers and sycophants--not to say the millions of fans who (to me inexplicably) responded viscerally to his showmanship; all of these curious strands of human entanglement were wrapped tightly around the singular musical and physical talent that seemed to possess him.
In a rush to lionize him in the first flush of sadness over his passing, the mainstream press focused on his obvious achievements in music and often went too far in calling him a "groundbreaker". This in particular mystifies me--he didn't break any ground not already trod by the truly great Muhammad Ali, and while he did cross the color barrier, the newsbreakers seem to forget that musically, the color barrier had already been crossed by Motown years prior (though admittedly whites and blacks by the early 1980s had stopped listening to the same music with the advent of Album Oriented Rock radio stations and the attendant Caucasianization of that blues-based genre).
Those African-Americans who were heard commenting on his passing were--and perhaps they can be forgiven for this in their surprise and their grief--apparently willing to ignore the very obvious and major flaws that in the case of his relationship to young boys may have in fact been villainous; and to focus entirely on his worldwide fame, his "wonderfulness" as a human being, and of course his record-shattering musical achievements.
Mr. Jackson's life and death are far, far beyond the capacity of this blogger to do more than briefly comment upon, and yet I am, like the rest of world, caught up, for now, in the mystery and the wonder of his outsized persona.
It is perhaps as interesting to note the items driven like stricken hounds from the world's front pages by the Jackson death: first, Iran, where a great nation lies torn and beaten after a week of shocking events; second, the inept amours of the smitten governor who disappeared to Argentina without seeming to understand how it might affect his public duties; third, and very sadly, the same-day-death of the extraordinarily popular and most talented actress Farrah Fawcett (whose charms also were mostly lost on me)--and whose passing would certainly have dominated the news had not the earth suddenly quaked in that rented Los Angeles home occupied by the Gloved One.
--Renaissance
Friday, June 26, 2009
Those who have been tramping through the Amazon or lost on the wrong side of an Antarcitic mountain may not know, but the rest of us know that Michael Jackson is dead at 50. I will bet dollars to doughnuts he was badly overmedicated and that his handlers, especially those with trunks full of pills, will have much to answer for in the coming months.
In fairness to my own musical taste, I must state up front that, no matter how sad or how evocative I might find his passing, his music never worked for me even a little bit. I found it strangely cold and unappealing despite my acknowledgement of its technical mastery. The same for his dancing: wonderful in its way, but robotic, alienating, icy. The school of dancing characterized by many dancers simultaneously making the same elaborate, jerky movements has always struck me as not a little fascistic (and clearly militaristic) in nature.
He presented, more than anything else in the past decade, a figure twisted by multiple, compounded tragedies. His horrid visage, his trysts with children, his queer amusement-park "ranch", his bizarre liaisons with the mothers of the children of which he had custody (not his biologically), his obvious financial and physical frailty, his long train of lawsuits and his multitudinous retinue of handlers and sycophants--not to say the millions of fans who (to me inexplicably) responded viscerally to his showmanship; all of these curious strands of human entanglement were wrapped tightly around the singular musical and physical talent that seemed to possess him.
In a rush to lionize him in the first flush of sadness over his passing, the mainstream press focused on his obvious achievements in music and often went too far in calling him a "groundbreaker". This in particular mystifies me--he didn't break any ground not already trod by the truly great Muhammad Ali, and while he did cross the color barrier, the newsbreakers seem to forget that musically, the color barrier had already been crossed by Motown years prior (though admittedly whites and blacks by the early 1980s had stopped listening to the same music with the advent of Album Oriented Rock radio stations and the attendant Caucasianization of that blues-based genre).
Those African-Americans who were heard commenting on his passing were--and perhaps they can be forgiven for this in their surprise and their grief--apparently willing to ignore the very obvious and major flaws that in the case of his relationship to young boys may have in fact been villainous; and to focus entirely on his worldwide fame, his "wonderfulness" as a human being, and of course his record-shattering musical achievements.
Mr. Jackson's life and death are far, far beyond the capacity of this blogger to do more than briefly comment upon, and yet I am, like the rest of world, caught up, for now, in the mystery and the wonder of his outsized persona.
It is perhaps as interesting to note the items driven like stricken hounds from the world's front pages by the Jackson death: first, Iran, where a great nation lies torn and beaten after a week of shocking events; second, the inept amours of the smitten governor who disappeared to Argentina without seeming to understand how it might affect his public duties; third, and very sadly, the same-day-death of the extraordinarily popular and most talented actress Farrah Fawcett (whose charms also were mostly lost on me)--and whose passing would certainly have dominated the news had not the earth suddenly quaked in that rented Los Angeles home occupied by the Gloved One.
--Renaissance
Friday, June 26, 2009
Bing was a Crooner
Have you heard?
Now you can make better decisions. With Bing, the new "decision engine" from Microsoft!
Ads for the new Google-competitor from Redmond actually suggest you can change your life with this wonderful Bing thing--avoid getting a Mohawk, for instance (I think that's what they were driving at)? Or learning to play guitar at the age of six or seven? Bing will help you decide.
How exactly does this astonishing new decision engine work? Maybe I am missing something, but I could swear the decision engine, having responded to my quest for an answer about "clean energy", gave me--and let's not get too excited waiting for the revelation here--a list of links with the words "clean energy" in them! And the top spot in the "sponsored" section was for the clean energy giant we all know as ExxonMobil.
I don't have a problem with ExxonMobil--somebody's got to sell me all that gasoline I use--but if I can have just a brief word with the guys over at Bing, I would like to tell them that they need to fire their ad agency.
I don't have a problem with Microsoft, either. They've managed to produce a suite of tools that somehow satisfies about a trillion people last time I checked and there's not a lot of smoke belching out of the smokestacks at Microsoft HQ either. So it isn't as if they don't create a pretty popular and a pretty green product out in the land of Gates.
But the ads for Bing are nothing less than insulting. Okay, MSFT wants to have a Google-killer. Good luck with that. At one point they thought MSN was going to kill the Internet (you can choose not to believe that, but it's a real-live data-point from the mid-nineties). Aside from a wonderful spin-off called MSNBC, I can't see where they created anything better than Hotmail with that gargantuan effort.
But back to my annoyance with Bing, and how the ads are insulting. What's with "decision engine"? That's not what it is. It would have to be far more sophisticated to approach that realm--something like an expert system (still a chimerical goal for visionary developers) that would somehow divine your intent and deliver wisdom.
It's like calling a car an airplane. Bing is a search engine--it's just like Google! The notion that we should be encouraged to "Bing and then decide" is worse than cute and silly. In my opinion, calling Bing a "decision engine" borders on misrepresentation and falsehood.
But then, Microsoft has always seemed to have a tin ear for marketing. That's a whole 'nother blog post.
For now, just remember that Bing was a Crooner popular back during World War Two. He was not a decision engine.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Now you can make better decisions. With Bing, the new "decision engine" from Microsoft!
Ads for the new Google-competitor from Redmond actually suggest you can change your life with this wonderful Bing thing--avoid getting a Mohawk, for instance (I think that's what they were driving at)? Or learning to play guitar at the age of six or seven? Bing will help you decide.
How exactly does this astonishing new decision engine work? Maybe I am missing something, but I could swear the decision engine, having responded to my quest for an answer about "clean energy", gave me--and let's not get too excited waiting for the revelation here--a list of links with the words "clean energy" in them! And the top spot in the "sponsored" section was for the clean energy giant we all know as ExxonMobil.
I don't have a problem with ExxonMobil--somebody's got to sell me all that gasoline I use--but if I can have just a brief word with the guys over at Bing, I would like to tell them that they need to fire their ad agency.
I don't have a problem with Microsoft, either. They've managed to produce a suite of tools that somehow satisfies about a trillion people last time I checked and there's not a lot of smoke belching out of the smokestacks at Microsoft HQ either. So it isn't as if they don't create a pretty popular and a pretty green product out in the land of Gates.
But the ads for Bing are nothing less than insulting. Okay, MSFT wants to have a Google-killer. Good luck with that. At one point they thought MSN was going to kill the Internet (you can choose not to believe that, but it's a real-live data-point from the mid-nineties). Aside from a wonderful spin-off called MSNBC, I can't see where they created anything better than Hotmail with that gargantuan effort.
But back to my annoyance with Bing, and how the ads are insulting. What's with "decision engine"? That's not what it is. It would have to be far more sophisticated to approach that realm--something like an expert system (still a chimerical goal for visionary developers) that would somehow divine your intent and deliver wisdom.
It's like calling a car an airplane. Bing is a search engine--it's just like Google! The notion that we should be encouraged to "Bing and then decide" is worse than cute and silly. In my opinion, calling Bing a "decision engine" borders on misrepresentation and falsehood.
But then, Microsoft has always seemed to have a tin ear for marketing. That's a whole 'nother blog post.
For now, just remember that Bing was a Crooner popular back during World War Two. He was not a decision engine.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Tehran a-Twitter
Journalists have been under virtual house-arrest as the mullahs in Persia try to squelch what started out as a stolen-vote protest but is now evidently a youth revolution. Youth revolutions, as we know, are tough to squelch without either pots of money to bundle kids off to college and the suburbs, or a deep roster of brutal bench-players ready to come on the field with brickbats and piano-wire.
As the mullahs whirl and wobble in the wind of protest, and as journalists speak sotto voce into secure phones, what's kept CNN and the rest of the West informed are the so-called "social networking" technologies now come of age.
Witness Twitter--of which much fun has been made when, say, an Ashley Tisdale-level celebri-star lets her followers know her hat-size. Now it is the single best source of immediate news coverage on the scene of what is certainly the most important political movement in Iran since they took the hostages. Like a thousand tiny salamanders slipping through grasping clerical fingers, these brief missives from the angry streets are letting the world know of thousands on the march, men and women, of beatings, of tear-gas, of open revolt against the foundational, turban-bedecked figures of the regime itself.
Witness Facebook--where the opposition leader Moussavi has pronounced his readiness to commit himself to martyrdom. Proving itself more than just a place for posting pix of beer-pong escapades, Facebook has now given voice to perhaps the most profound promise every posted to it.
During the new Iranian revolution Facebook and Twitter, streaming out images and commentary banned by the regime, have combined to make quite obvious the power that the atomization of mass media has long promised.
Facebook and Twitter prove that media--and information--really do want to be free. And they prove that when in the hands of those not just longing for freedom but with little left to lose, they become powerful weapons beyond the control of even the most sullen official opprobrium.
We have yet to see what happens when the youthful string of Iranian frustration plays out to its fullest length. But however it does so, we know even now that "social media", heretofore considered a lightweight in the world of communications, will have helped define it.
--Renaissance
Saturday, June 20, 2009
As the mullahs whirl and wobble in the wind of protest, and as journalists speak sotto voce into secure phones, what's kept CNN and the rest of the West informed are the so-called "social networking" technologies now come of age.
Witness Twitter--of which much fun has been made when, say, an Ashley Tisdale-level celebri-star lets her followers know her hat-size. Now it is the single best source of immediate news coverage on the scene of what is certainly the most important political movement in Iran since they took the hostages. Like a thousand tiny salamanders slipping through grasping clerical fingers, these brief missives from the angry streets are letting the world know of thousands on the march, men and women, of beatings, of tear-gas, of open revolt against the foundational, turban-bedecked figures of the regime itself.
Witness Facebook--where the opposition leader Moussavi has pronounced his readiness to commit himself to martyrdom. Proving itself more than just a place for posting pix of beer-pong escapades, Facebook has now given voice to perhaps the most profound promise every posted to it.
During the new Iranian revolution Facebook and Twitter, streaming out images and commentary banned by the regime, have combined to make quite obvious the power that the atomization of mass media has long promised.
Facebook and Twitter prove that media--and information--really do want to be free. And they prove that when in the hands of those not just longing for freedom but with little left to lose, they become powerful weapons beyond the control of even the most sullen official opprobrium.
We have yet to see what happens when the youthful string of Iranian frustration plays out to its fullest length. But however it does so, we know even now that "social media", heretofore considered a lightweight in the world of communications, will have helped define it.
--Renaissance
Saturday, June 20, 2009
A Modest Proposal
There is no compelling reason for any car company to build more than a couple of thousand cars a month for the foreseeable future.
They should all switch to building mass-transit vehicles,including buses, light rail, bullet trains and airplanes with bigger seats.
For the next ten years, we should learn the one lesson Cuba has to teach us (besides some great musical riffs): fix the old cars. Keep them on the road. When everyone is driving a ten or fifteen year old car, and when our nation is crisscrossed not with highways but with much-more-efficient mass-transit of every kind, then the car companies can go back to building pleasure-mobiles.
In particular, General Motors, which we now own much of, should begin doing this right away. No more Chevys. No more Caddies. During World War Two they stopped building LaSalles and instead built the Sherman tanks and B-29 Superfortresses that cemented our position as a world power even up until today.
Now we are sucking down foreign oil like nobody's business, and the suburbs have proven a bad idea soon to be depopulated in an emerging, less-wasteful economy, and we have succeeded in creating some of the ugliest landscapes in the world with our obsession with parking lots and malls; and it is time to call an end to it.
General Motors, your orders are as follows: no more cars for a while. Buses and trains are what we need.
--Renaissance
Thursday, June 11, 2009
They should all switch to building mass-transit vehicles,including buses, light rail, bullet trains and airplanes with bigger seats.
For the next ten years, we should learn the one lesson Cuba has to teach us (besides some great musical riffs): fix the old cars. Keep them on the road. When everyone is driving a ten or fifteen year old car, and when our nation is crisscrossed not with highways but with much-more-efficient mass-transit of every kind, then the car companies can go back to building pleasure-mobiles.
In particular, General Motors, which we now own much of, should begin doing this right away. No more Chevys. No more Caddies. During World War Two they stopped building LaSalles and instead built the Sherman tanks and B-29 Superfortresses that cemented our position as a world power even up until today.
Now we are sucking down foreign oil like nobody's business, and the suburbs have proven a bad idea soon to be depopulated in an emerging, less-wasteful economy, and we have succeeded in creating some of the ugliest landscapes in the world with our obsession with parking lots and malls; and it is time to call an end to it.
General Motors, your orders are as follows: no more cars for a while. Buses and trains are what we need.
--Renaissance
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Please Stop Taking Pictures, Please
Too many people are taking too many photographs.
I blame the digital revolution--in which data storage has become geometrically cheaper each year, thereby enabling more and more photos to be taken with better and better resolution at almost no cost except the purchase of the camera itself.
(Disclaimer: occasional snapshots have my complete support, especially when populated by family members smiling and hugging.)
My problem is with the quintillion photographs that are destined to mean not much to anyone, including the photographer. To me, it seems these photographs are being taken, often by travelers weighed down with brand new-looking SLRS, in pursuit of what I imagine to be "experience" or "sensation" or perhaps bragging-rights.
I believe, perhaps like an old-fashioned Photographer might, that one has the right to take photos (save snapshots) only if one understands what type of relationship one is taking to the subject matter.
No longer part of the scene, the person behind the lens has removed him/herself from the experience and has sublimated the direct experience for the flattened, miniaturized memory. This can create the comfortable sensation that all the world is just an arrangement of shapes passing by our rangefinder (or by proxy, someone else's). Grandeur is reduced to banality; compassion and empathy to passing interest; awe to intellectual criticism.
Ultimately the great digital photography revolution is creating a race of lonesome hunters, each seeking to capture some solitary image cropped and presented to one's self (and others) as the essence of experience--in total ignorance that the actual experience of plain "being" has passed them by.
When traveling, I recommend the type of camera that can fit in your pocket--if that. This way you don't need to worry about that brick of digital circuitry hanging like an albatross around your neck. Postcards often work well as a substitute for all but the most spectacular photos you might take yourself. Of course, be certain to record you and your friends and loved ones in those special places you've visited.
But other than this--please get your face out from behind the camera and spend some time being fully present in the world you inhabit.
--Renaissance
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
I blame the digital revolution--in which data storage has become geometrically cheaper each year, thereby enabling more and more photos to be taken with better and better resolution at almost no cost except the purchase of the camera itself.
(Disclaimer: occasional snapshots have my complete support, especially when populated by family members smiling and hugging.)
My problem is with the quintillion photographs that are destined to mean not much to anyone, including the photographer. To me, it seems these photographs are being taken, often by travelers weighed down with brand new-looking SLRS, in pursuit of what I imagine to be "experience" or "sensation" or perhaps bragging-rights.
I believe, perhaps like an old-fashioned Photographer might, that one has the right to take photos (save snapshots) only if one understands what type of relationship one is taking to the subject matter.
No longer part of the scene, the person behind the lens has removed him/herself from the experience and has sublimated the direct experience for the flattened, miniaturized memory. This can create the comfortable sensation that all the world is just an arrangement of shapes passing by our rangefinder (or by proxy, someone else's). Grandeur is reduced to banality; compassion and empathy to passing interest; awe to intellectual criticism.
Ultimately the great digital photography revolution is creating a race of lonesome hunters, each seeking to capture some solitary image cropped and presented to one's self (and others) as the essence of experience--in total ignorance that the actual experience of plain "being" has passed them by.
When traveling, I recommend the type of camera that can fit in your pocket--if that. This way you don't need to worry about that brick of digital circuitry hanging like an albatross around your neck. Postcards often work well as a substitute for all but the most spectacular photos you might take yourself. Of course, be certain to record you and your friends and loved ones in those special places you've visited.
But other than this--please get your face out from behind the camera and spend some time being fully present in the world you inhabit.
--Renaissance
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Sonia from the Block
I don't know whether or not I agree with the way she ruled on the New Haven firefighter test. I don't know whether I believe a Latina woman will automatically come up with a better decision than some white dude (and I don't know if I much like the word "Latina", which for me has a whiff of condescension about it).
I don't know whether she got some kind of break somewhere because she's Hispanic, but I do know that lots of white kids got breaks because they had connections and she is where she is and unless you're Clarence Thomas, you don't get that far because you always managed to be the convenient racial choice--you probably had to be pretty much better than pretty much everybody else. They don't give away grades at Princeton, I know that, and they don't give you the Yale Law Review editorship because you batted your big brown eyes at somebody either.
I don't know whether her so-called brusque manner is going to impede her ability to adjudicate on the highest court in the land (I pretty much doubt it will); but I do know that I am not surprised she might come across as blunt or sharp, because if you grew up in the Bronx and you live in the West Village that makes you a New Yorker and chances are you don't take a lot of shit from people. Sometimes New Yorkers get accused of being rude but mostly it's that we're impatient with morons. Maybe she has a little of that in her--I don't really know.
I know one thing, though. I am supporting her. Not because she is Hispanic, or a woman, or because she is Obama's well-considered choice. No, I am supporting her because she is from the Bronx. I don't care what anybody says, the Supreme Court needs somebody from the Bronx. Somebody who knows where Jerome Avenue is and knows what it's like to stand on an elevated train platform on a winter afternoon. Somebody who knows how bad traffic can be on Fordham Road on Saturday. You get the picture: somebody who knows the sights, sounds and smells of the real world. Plus, she saved baseball, for heaven's sake!
Sonia from the block? Maybe she is. I don't know. But let's go for it.
--Renaissance
Friday, May 29, 2009
I don't know whether she got some kind of break somewhere because she's Hispanic, but I do know that lots of white kids got breaks because they had connections and she is where she is and unless you're Clarence Thomas, you don't get that far because you always managed to be the convenient racial choice--you probably had to be pretty much better than pretty much everybody else. They don't give away grades at Princeton, I know that, and they don't give you the Yale Law Review editorship because you batted your big brown eyes at somebody either.
I don't know whether her so-called brusque manner is going to impede her ability to adjudicate on the highest court in the land (I pretty much doubt it will); but I do know that I am not surprised she might come across as blunt or sharp, because if you grew up in the Bronx and you live in the West Village that makes you a New Yorker and chances are you don't take a lot of shit from people. Sometimes New Yorkers get accused of being rude but mostly it's that we're impatient with morons. Maybe she has a little of that in her--I don't really know.
I know one thing, though. I am supporting her. Not because she is Hispanic, or a woman, or because she is Obama's well-considered choice. No, I am supporting her because she is from the Bronx. I don't care what anybody says, the Supreme Court needs somebody from the Bronx. Somebody who knows where Jerome Avenue is and knows what it's like to stand on an elevated train platform on a winter afternoon. Somebody who knows how bad traffic can be on Fordham Road on Saturday. You get the picture: somebody who knows the sights, sounds and smells of the real world. Plus, she saved baseball, for heaven's sake!
Sonia from the block? Maybe she is. I don't know. But let's go for it.
--Renaissance
Friday, May 29, 2009
Now, About That Big "Terror Bust". . .
Either we are much, much safer than we might have hoped (because the would-be terrorists that just got arrested seem to be some of the most inept creatures on god's green earth), or we have an anti-terror constabulary focused on giving themselves big, neatly wrapped presents with bows and ribbons and bells even as real terrorists smirk and keep silent and continue to plot.
I am not qualified to know which is closer to the truth.
But I do know there is something of a "you've-got-to-be-kidding" air about the latest terror-ring bust. This is the one where a handfull of career petty thieves (one of them has been called by his older sister "the stupidest man in the world") were hanging around a Catholic drop-in center in a downtrodden Hudson Valley town, then apparently knocking back 40 ounce jars of malt liquor on their broken-down porch and talking about hating Jews and finally "located" at a local mosque by a shady police informant who plied them with money and radical jihad yammer until they believed they were actually going to shoot down planes with rockets and bomb the hell out of Riverdale.
Can anyone rationally believe this is a meaningful moment in the fight against terror? Or is it a case of police collaboration in the creation of a "plot" that never would have amounted to more than a few slugs of rotgut and a long nap had there not been ready cash, promises of grandeur, fake weapons procurement, free transportation, and logistical planning all courtesy of our collective anti-terror tax-dollar?
Not that the clowns who got hauled away having planted what they thought were deadly bombs outside synagogues deserve any quarter of sympathy--let them rot wherever they are tossed. But this was not, by any stretch of the imagination what one police official called "a textbook anti-terror operation". No, this was more like the fireman who went into the woods with matches and then rushed back to the firehouse yelling fire--soon to be crowned hero having doused the flames he sparked.
As I was saying--either all the would-be terrorists are idiotic to a degree that beggars belief, or the anti-terrorists are just not noticing what the smart ones are really up to.
--Renaissance
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I am not qualified to know which is closer to the truth.
But I do know there is something of a "you've-got-to-be-kidding" air about the latest terror-ring bust. This is the one where a handfull of career petty thieves (one of them has been called by his older sister "the stupidest man in the world") were hanging around a Catholic drop-in center in a downtrodden Hudson Valley town, then apparently knocking back 40 ounce jars of malt liquor on their broken-down porch and talking about hating Jews and finally "located" at a local mosque by a shady police informant who plied them with money and radical jihad yammer until they believed they were actually going to shoot down planes with rockets and bomb the hell out of Riverdale.
Can anyone rationally believe this is a meaningful moment in the fight against terror? Or is it a case of police collaboration in the creation of a "plot" that never would have amounted to more than a few slugs of rotgut and a long nap had there not been ready cash, promises of grandeur, fake weapons procurement, free transportation, and logistical planning all courtesy of our collective anti-terror tax-dollar?
Not that the clowns who got hauled away having planted what they thought were deadly bombs outside synagogues deserve any quarter of sympathy--let them rot wherever they are tossed. But this was not, by any stretch of the imagination what one police official called "a textbook anti-terror operation". No, this was more like the fireman who went into the woods with matches and then rushed back to the firehouse yelling fire--soon to be crowned hero having doused the flames he sparked.
As I was saying--either all the would-be terrorists are idiotic to a degree that beggars belief, or the anti-terrorists are just not noticing what the smart ones are really up to.
--Renaissance
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Car Dealership Closing? Boo Hoo!
Sorry to seem (and be) so unsympathetic to the plight of the poor, unwanted car dealerships that are losing their license to sell GM and Chrysler cars.
But I think I am not alone in estimating, based on experience, car-dealerships among the most dishonest storefronts on the American highway. How many times have we all had to deal with their "lowest I can go" chicanery and "your car's condition is killing you on the trade-in" and the transparent foolery of "going to talk to my boss" in trying to get a price for a new car? Can anyone say that the act of buying a car is almost always (foreign dealerships not excluded) deeply unpleasant and often at least moderately threatening in nature?
I remember going to buy a new car once not long ago and letting the sales guy know I didn't really want the fanciest version of the model I wanted, but a trimmer version at a lower price. He said "You're gonna hurt yourself!"
"What are you talking about?"
"At trade-in time!"
"Oh."
I went to a different dealership. They didn't treat me much better, but they didn't leak slime all over me, either.
Guys, sorry if your ride is over. I wish I could say I thought it was a pleasant one.
--Renaissance
Friday, May 15, 2009
But I think I am not alone in estimating, based on experience, car-dealerships among the most dishonest storefronts on the American highway. How many times have we all had to deal with their "lowest I can go" chicanery and "your car's condition is killing you on the trade-in" and the transparent foolery of "going to talk to my boss" in trying to get a price for a new car? Can anyone say that the act of buying a car is almost always (foreign dealerships not excluded) deeply unpleasant and often at least moderately threatening in nature?
I remember going to buy a new car once not long ago and letting the sales guy know I didn't really want the fanciest version of the model I wanted, but a trimmer version at a lower price. He said "You're gonna hurt yourself!"
"What are you talking about?"
"At trade-in time!"
"Oh."
I went to a different dealership. They didn't treat me much better, but they didn't leak slime all over me, either.
Guys, sorry if your ride is over. I wish I could say I thought it was a pleasant one.
--Renaissance
Friday, May 15, 2009
Cheney's Reasons
Observers of the 24/7 news marathon Dick Cheney has decided to run, can be forgiven for wondering why a man who spent eight years in a brooding cone-of-silence has now become as chatty as a new intern trying to make an impression on his boss. And he's chatting about torture no less!
He has two reasons, really: one, he is trying to reach the potential jury pool that might eventually form when his minions and perhaps even he himself go on trial for un-American activities and lying to the American people about the purpose of the incredibly wasteful war in Iraq.
Second, he probably understands better than anyone that he has certain senior Democrats in a trap--because it will soon be revealed fairly clearly that they also knew what was going on in the detention centers. I am talking about Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Reid and several others who were senior enough, and acquiescent enough, at the height of the Bush/Cheney reign, to have heard the details and to have been able to make their objections known, but who did not.
Keeping these powerful Democrats from appearing to be collaborators will keep the torture prosecutions off the table.
Cheney will keep torturing us with torture until we stop talking about further investigations. Then he will go back to adding that extra room onto his house and leave us all alone.
--Renaissance
Thursday, May 14, 2009
He has two reasons, really: one, he is trying to reach the potential jury pool that might eventually form when his minions and perhaps even he himself go on trial for un-American activities and lying to the American people about the purpose of the incredibly wasteful war in Iraq.
Second, he probably understands better than anyone that he has certain senior Democrats in a trap--because it will soon be revealed fairly clearly that they also knew what was going on in the detention centers. I am talking about Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Reid and several others who were senior enough, and acquiescent enough, at the height of the Bush/Cheney reign, to have heard the details and to have been able to make their objections known, but who did not.
Keeping these powerful Democrats from appearing to be collaborators will keep the torture prosecutions off the table.
Cheney will keep torturing us with torture until we stop talking about further investigations. Then he will go back to adding that extra room onto his house and leave us all alone.
--Renaissance
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Another in a Series of Ground Zero Observations
Because I get to see the mess every day, I get to talk about it more than would seem entirely called-for, and since I "was there that day" I am likely to say things that don't seem all that polite or correct.
First: give up the dream that goes something like "We shall rise again".
We're not that kind of crowd anymore. We dicker and bicker and let things get too sacred and in an effort to over-assuage and over-consult and let property-ownership play too big a role, we end up with what now is certainly going to be a big hole in Manhattan for many years, perhaps decades to come. I don't necessarily like to say "I told you so" but I won't pretend I didn't say it already: there's nothing much going on there, and all those derricks and cranes are a big show for tourists.
Second: except for the first couple of years of bedraggled piety that seemed to overcome everyone who got near the site, tourists now come to gawk and buy "disaster" booklets on their way to Wall Street or other nearby attractions. Which is fine.
But about a week ago I finally saw for the first time--the only time--what I thought was a suitable reaction. A Japanese tourist overlooked the mess, briefly bowed with hands clasped, and then proceeded to take pictures. It was a gesture of acknowledgment without the kind of sanctimony that has trammeled half of what might have been good about a rebuilt Ground Zero in time.
Third, and this will be ignored, but here goes: can someone please get rid of all the cranes that won't be used until 2020, sod that vast are over, re-instate Fulton Street so a person can walk across the taxpayer-owned region without having to traverse a tarp-covered bridge and a soggy boardwalk for the next forty years, and take down the damned Deutsche-Bank building quickly as if it were the disgraceful eyesore that everyone knows it to be and not some delicate instrument that needs to be disassembled in a vacuum-sealed laboratory?
Fourth: So far, Osama has gotten all he might have asked for and more with his strike: a great nation has been distracted, suckered, half-broken and turned inside-out with fear and foolishness and humiliating "airport security" rigmarole (when all they needed was to lock the pilot's cabin door); a great city sits with a miserable hole in it that the effete residents seem too afraid to just rebuild as if rebuilding were the point.
--Renaissance
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
First: give up the dream that goes something like "We shall rise again".
We're not that kind of crowd anymore. We dicker and bicker and let things get too sacred and in an effort to over-assuage and over-consult and let property-ownership play too big a role, we end up with what now is certainly going to be a big hole in Manhattan for many years, perhaps decades to come. I don't necessarily like to say "I told you so" but I won't pretend I didn't say it already: there's nothing much going on there, and all those derricks and cranes are a big show for tourists.
Second: except for the first couple of years of bedraggled piety that seemed to overcome everyone who got near the site, tourists now come to gawk and buy "disaster" booklets on their way to Wall Street or other nearby attractions. Which is fine.
But about a week ago I finally saw for the first time--the only time--what I thought was a suitable reaction. A Japanese tourist overlooked the mess, briefly bowed with hands clasped, and then proceeded to take pictures. It was a gesture of acknowledgment without the kind of sanctimony that has trammeled half of what might have been good about a rebuilt Ground Zero in time.
Third, and this will be ignored, but here goes: can someone please get rid of all the cranes that won't be used until 2020, sod that vast are over, re-instate Fulton Street so a person can walk across the taxpayer-owned region without having to traverse a tarp-covered bridge and a soggy boardwalk for the next forty years, and take down the damned Deutsche-Bank building quickly as if it were the disgraceful eyesore that everyone knows it to be and not some delicate instrument that needs to be disassembled in a vacuum-sealed laboratory?
Fourth: So far, Osama has gotten all he might have asked for and more with his strike: a great nation has been distracted, suckered, half-broken and turned inside-out with fear and foolishness and humiliating "airport security" rigmarole (when all they needed was to lock the pilot's cabin door); a great city sits with a miserable hole in it that the effete residents seem too afraid to just rebuild as if rebuilding were the point.
--Renaissance
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
What's the Big Deal with Bicycling, Anyway?
I have owned several bikes in my time--a homemade one crafted by a handy cousin was my first, and I enjoyed it. On the block it, and I, were known to be "fast". That was cool.
But since then the bicycle has become virtuous and one is supposed to wear a helmet while "getting one's exercise", and I no longer see the bicycle (as I did when I was ten) as a rapid-getaway machine in a mixed-housing suburb.
I own one now--living in an aparment building with an elevator and a promenade nearby--and have come to think of it more as an encumbrance, or to be more precise, a pain in the ass. It takes up a lot of room in the apartment and I keep trying to think of its clear virtues and am having a tough time coming up with any.
For instance, where can I go with the bike that I cannot walk to in not much more time and with much less hassle over locks, keys, and bringing stuff back home; or that I cannot get to by subway swiftly, effortlessly, and again without the annoyance of having to tote a helmet and secure the darn thing with a lock on some traffic pole; and what more exercise do I really get, unless I am bound to be ostentatiously strenous (sweating in pursuit of some virtuous condition known as "fitness"), that I could not get by walking a mile or two--again, unencumbered my anything more difficult to manage at journey's end than a jacket or small backpack (and even the backpack seems more than absolutely necessary to a person who recalls things called "pockets").
And then there is the urban bicycle journey itself. Far from relaxing or exhilerating, it is more a tortuous gauntlet of either "watching out" for what always appear to be clueless pedestrians walking expansively and very much too slowly in your path; or worse, "watching out" for vehicles thirty and forty times your size that pass you by at a distance of mere inches and which might, at a mere flick of the driver's wrist crush you like a sparrow. I watch bicyclers in Manhattan traffic and think of the madness of those who run with the bulls in Pamplona. How can a sane person subject one's self to the snorting, reeking, onrushing menace of internally combusted vehicles without realizing one is engaging in an activity not much less dangerous than dawn patrol in Sadr City? My conclusion is, one cannot.
My advice: unless you live in a bike-path-only environment and have no need to carry more than a few bananas and a stick of butter back from the market to your nearby home, or unless someone is paying you to ride in traffic--put down the bike. Get a pair of walking shoes. Take a walk. Relax. Take a nap in the park. Then walk home. You'll feel much better for it, and much more civilized.
--Renaissance
Sunday, May 10, 2009
But since then the bicycle has become virtuous and one is supposed to wear a helmet while "getting one's exercise", and I no longer see the bicycle (as I did when I was ten) as a rapid-getaway machine in a mixed-housing suburb.
I own one now--living in an aparment building with an elevator and a promenade nearby--and have come to think of it more as an encumbrance, or to be more precise, a pain in the ass. It takes up a lot of room in the apartment and I keep trying to think of its clear virtues and am having a tough time coming up with any.
For instance, where can I go with the bike that I cannot walk to in not much more time and with much less hassle over locks, keys, and bringing stuff back home; or that I cannot get to by subway swiftly, effortlessly, and again without the annoyance of having to tote a helmet and secure the darn thing with a lock on some traffic pole; and what more exercise do I really get, unless I am bound to be ostentatiously strenous (sweating in pursuit of some virtuous condition known as "fitness"), that I could not get by walking a mile or two--again, unencumbered my anything more difficult to manage at journey's end than a jacket or small backpack (and even the backpack seems more than absolutely necessary to a person who recalls things called "pockets").
And then there is the urban bicycle journey itself. Far from relaxing or exhilerating, it is more a tortuous gauntlet of either "watching out" for what always appear to be clueless pedestrians walking expansively and very much too slowly in your path; or worse, "watching out" for vehicles thirty and forty times your size that pass you by at a distance of mere inches and which might, at a mere flick of the driver's wrist crush you like a sparrow. I watch bicyclers in Manhattan traffic and think of the madness of those who run with the bulls in Pamplona. How can a sane person subject one's self to the snorting, reeking, onrushing menace of internally combusted vehicles without realizing one is engaging in an activity not much less dangerous than dawn patrol in Sadr City? My conclusion is, one cannot.
My advice: unless you live in a bike-path-only environment and have no need to carry more than a few bananas and a stick of butter back from the market to your nearby home, or unless someone is paying you to ride in traffic--put down the bike. Get a pair of walking shoes. Take a walk. Relax. Take a nap in the park. Then walk home. You'll feel much better for it, and much more civilized.
--Renaissance
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Exit the King (sort of a review)
I am probably one of the least likely candidates for theater criticism, owing to my long-standing habit of falling asleep for at least a brief period during nearly every live performance I have ever attended--and that has included rock concerts, flamenco performances and comedy shows--but since I only fell asleep very, very briefly during a recent performance of Ionesco's "Exit the King" on Broadway, I figure I am, at least in this case, well-enough qualified to comment.
First, let me say that if you are prone to being depressed about things like the economy, death, and the possible presence of a nearby psychopomp, you should not see this show.
For those of you who do not read H.P.Lovecraft and do not have a preternaturally broad vocabulary, a psychopomp is a being or spirit that leads you from life into death as you are dying. Legend has it that whipoorwhills are psychopomps--they cry loudest around houses where someone is dying (it is told).
But back to the Ethel Barrymore Theater and the play:
Susan Sarandon plays the psychopomp, though you don't realize it unitl the end. In flat, unsympathetic tones, she, the older queen, informs the King he shall soon die. The King denies all--selfishly, moodily, and with a certain goofy grandiloquence. His younger "queen" denies it as well, but only as it serves her--she eventually accepts his imminent death.
There is a doctor who helps us understand that the very heavens are cracking, but he struck me as near-irrelevant. As did the armor-clad simpleton who made press-conference-like announcements. A servant-woman was more pithy and anchored the story some.
In the end, the king accepts that he is to die, as is his kingdom to perish entirely and clearly this is metaphor for all life and all death: postulating that what we perceive as us and ours ceases to be--literally--at the moment of dissolution.
Perhaps that's why the elder queen became a sympathetic character at the end, leading the king through the necessary portals to his doom.
Here's to the psychopomp! As necessary as a crossing guard, perhaps?
In the meantime, if you enjoy comedy of the blackest sort, do see the show--it is well acted and Geoffrey Rush is up for a Tony.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
First, let me say that if you are prone to being depressed about things like the economy, death, and the possible presence of a nearby psychopomp, you should not see this show.
For those of you who do not read H.P.Lovecraft and do not have a preternaturally broad vocabulary, a psychopomp is a being or spirit that leads you from life into death as you are dying. Legend has it that whipoorwhills are psychopomps--they cry loudest around houses where someone is dying (it is told).
But back to the Ethel Barrymore Theater and the play:
Susan Sarandon plays the psychopomp, though you don't realize it unitl the end. In flat, unsympathetic tones, she, the older queen, informs the King he shall soon die. The King denies all--selfishly, moodily, and with a certain goofy grandiloquence. His younger "queen" denies it as well, but only as it serves her--she eventually accepts his imminent death.
There is a doctor who helps us understand that the very heavens are cracking, but he struck me as near-irrelevant. As did the armor-clad simpleton who made press-conference-like announcements. A servant-woman was more pithy and anchored the story some.
In the end, the king accepts that he is to die, as is his kingdom to perish entirely and clearly this is metaphor for all life and all death: postulating that what we perceive as us and ours ceases to be--literally--at the moment of dissolution.
Perhaps that's why the elder queen became a sympathetic character at the end, leading the king through the necessary portals to his doom.
Here's to the psychopomp! As necessary as a crossing guard, perhaps?
In the meantime, if you enjoy comedy of the blackest sort, do see the show--it is well acted and Geoffrey Rush is up for a Tony.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Not Voting for Bloomberg
Recently a caller to my home introduced themselves as an employee of the Michael Bloomberg mayoral campaign and asked for my vote.
I said, "I will not be voting for Bloomberg because he allowed the Republicans to have their disgraceful convention in this city in the year 2004, an act for which he can never be forgiven."
"Oh, I see. Do you have anything else to tell me?"
"Just that I will not be voting for Bloomberg because he allowed the Republicans to have their disgraceful convention in this city in the year 2004, an act for which he can never be forgiven."
"Thank you, I've made a note of that."
A minute later, the phone rang again. It was the same person, looking this time for my wife.
I said, "She won't be voting for Bloomberg either, because he allowed the Republicans to have their disgraceful convention in this city in the year 2004, an act for which he can never be forgiven."
"Is that her opinion too?"
"No one in this house will be voting for Bloomberg--because he allowed the Republicans to have their disgraceful convention in this city in the year 2004, an act for which he can never be forgiven."
Besides the above, there are two other reasons why I am not voting for Bloomberg:
1. Ground Zero is a hole in the ground--and no hopeful signs that it won't be any time soon.
2. He ought to have supported an aggressive plan to crack down on the Wall Street barons who robbed this country during its period of crackpot Republicanism, yet did not.
Mainly though, it's because of the 2004 convention--an act for which Mayor Bloomberg can never be forgiven.
--Renaissance
Saturday, May 02, 2009
I said, "I will not be voting for Bloomberg because he allowed the Republicans to have their disgraceful convention in this city in the year 2004, an act for which he can never be forgiven."
"Oh, I see. Do you have anything else to tell me?"
"Just that I will not be voting for Bloomberg because he allowed the Republicans to have their disgraceful convention in this city in the year 2004, an act for which he can never be forgiven."
"Thank you, I've made a note of that."
A minute later, the phone rang again. It was the same person, looking this time for my wife.
I said, "She won't be voting for Bloomberg either, because he allowed the Republicans to have their disgraceful convention in this city in the year 2004, an act for which he can never be forgiven."
"Is that her opinion too?"
"No one in this house will be voting for Bloomberg--because he allowed the Republicans to have their disgraceful convention in this city in the year 2004, an act for which he can never be forgiven."
Besides the above, there are two other reasons why I am not voting for Bloomberg:
1. Ground Zero is a hole in the ground--and no hopeful signs that it won't be any time soon.
2. He ought to have supported an aggressive plan to crack down on the Wall Street barons who robbed this country during its period of crackpot Republicanism, yet did not.
Mainly though, it's because of the 2004 convention--an act for which Mayor Bloomberg can never be forgiven.
--Renaissance
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Who Put the Swine in Swine Flu?
There are two parts to the answer:
First, the prosaic: apparently, the current near-pandemic Swine Flu crossed to the human population at a pig farm owned by an American corporation in Mexico. So if anybody asks, it was American agribusiness, probably cutting corners on health and safety issues, that put the swine in Swine Flu.
Next, the metaphorical: The current wave of Swine Flu, having caused hundreds of deaths in Mexico and at least one in the United States, has caused a number of Americans in public life to behave like swine. These range from those who wonder aloud (and incorrectly) why swine flu outbreaks seems to happen under Democratic presidents to those whose instinct is to blame illegal immigrants for the dispersion of the disease.
The Swine Flu, to which the nation of Mexico has responded quickly and forthrightly, is being used by hatemongers across the United States to vilify, diminish and bear false witness against Mexicans as if there were some connection between the source of the influenza and the national character of the citizenry of our troubled neighbor to the south.
Tonight, President Obama had a news conference in which he actually began by telling Americans to wash their hands in order to keep from getting sick. I would add that we must wash our hands of xenophobia, jingoism and racism during the course of this wave of Swine Flu in order to keep from getting sick at heart.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
First, the prosaic: apparently, the current near-pandemic Swine Flu crossed to the human population at a pig farm owned by an American corporation in Mexico. So if anybody asks, it was American agribusiness, probably cutting corners on health and safety issues, that put the swine in Swine Flu.
Next, the metaphorical: The current wave of Swine Flu, having caused hundreds of deaths in Mexico and at least one in the United States, has caused a number of Americans in public life to behave like swine. These range from those who wonder aloud (and incorrectly) why swine flu outbreaks seems to happen under Democratic presidents to those whose instinct is to blame illegal immigrants for the dispersion of the disease.
The Swine Flu, to which the nation of Mexico has responded quickly and forthrightly, is being used by hatemongers across the United States to vilify, diminish and bear false witness against Mexicans as if there were some connection between the source of the influenza and the national character of the citizenry of our troubled neighbor to the south.
Tonight, President Obama had a news conference in which he actually began by telling Americans to wash their hands in order to keep from getting sick. I would add that we must wash our hands of xenophobia, jingoism and racism during the course of this wave of Swine Flu in order to keep from getting sick at heart.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Summer Pays a Visit
We are not done yet with April and Summer has snuck up behind us. It has snuck up so fast it has confused the summer creatures--the katydids, crickets, fireflies, mosquitoes, wasps--they make no sound in the April night. They are still cocooned perhaps in their nests, perhaps even roasting like so many croissants in tiny overheated ovens.
Today was in the high eighties and the trees, which have barely begun to blossom, took on a wilted August look. Tomorrow is supposed to break all records with something over 90 degrees. Once, I was in the Hudson Valley in July and it was the hottest place on earth at 106--hotter that day than Riyadh. The stunt fliers at the aerodrome wouldn't take the biplanes up--air too thin to support the spindly frames and fabric of the aeroplanes.
We are thinking of staying longer upstate--I am reading something in the Times about Swine Flu in New York City? Many schools in Mexico have closed and maybe we are next?
Not sure. I only know there is something wonderful and relaxing about blogging outdoors at night.
--Renaissance
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Today was in the high eighties and the trees, which have barely begun to blossom, took on a wilted August look. Tomorrow is supposed to break all records with something over 90 degrees. Once, I was in the Hudson Valley in July and it was the hottest place on earth at 106--hotter that day than Riyadh. The stunt fliers at the aerodrome wouldn't take the biplanes up--air too thin to support the spindly frames and fabric of the aeroplanes.
We are thinking of staying longer upstate--I am reading something in the Times about Swine Flu in New York City? Many schools in Mexico have closed and maybe we are next?
Not sure. I only know there is something wonderful and relaxing about blogging outdoors at night.
--Renaissance
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Into History's Dustbin
Obama's first hundred days have been notable for the passage of major economic legislation, the closing of Guantanamo, and a star-turn in Europe. But what has stood out most for me is the way Republican outrage continues unabated despite its overwhelming ineffectiveness.
Some may say it's generational, and it may well be. I say the voters meant business in November when they gave the hook to the old Navy pilot and his daffy pugilist in heels. And so the old arguments don't work anymore: the right-wing scare-tactic that used to tag the Democrat as some drug-crazed last remnant of the Manson-family from the 1960s, seems to have lost its magic.
Obama just seems to be unconcerned with any of it. He meant it when he said he was taking a new approach--to the economy, to the wars, to foreign policy, to health care, to human rights. He jokes with Hugo Chavez--confident he's not going to be tricked into some disadvantageous deal with the oil-bloated dictator. He welcomes an apparent new openness from Castro the Younger even as the Elder seeks to retract it all--but who looks like the grump? Not Obama.
Now it is the Republican who begins to sense he (or she) must fear being tagged as the torture-besotten, yellow-cake hallucinating last remnant of the Cheney-family from the Bush years, even as Cheney croaks, Manson-like from his tomb on Hannity-hill.
And freshly beginning to gather dust--just a thin coating right now but ever thickening--is the stiff carcass of old-fashioned Republicanism. It has at last joined Communism atop History's Dustbin.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Some may say it's generational, and it may well be. I say the voters meant business in November when they gave the hook to the old Navy pilot and his daffy pugilist in heels. And so the old arguments don't work anymore: the right-wing scare-tactic that used to tag the Democrat as some drug-crazed last remnant of the Manson-family from the 1960s, seems to have lost its magic.
Obama just seems to be unconcerned with any of it. He meant it when he said he was taking a new approach--to the economy, to the wars, to foreign policy, to health care, to human rights. He jokes with Hugo Chavez--confident he's not going to be tricked into some disadvantageous deal with the oil-bloated dictator. He welcomes an apparent new openness from Castro the Younger even as the Elder seeks to retract it all--but who looks like the grump? Not Obama.
Now it is the Republican who begins to sense he (or she) must fear being tagged as the torture-besotten, yellow-cake hallucinating last remnant of the Cheney-family from the Bush years, even as Cheney croaks, Manson-like from his tomb on Hannity-hill.
And freshly beginning to gather dust--just a thin coating right now but ever thickening--is the stiff carcass of old-fashioned Republicanism. It has at last joined Communism atop History's Dustbin.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
The David Wright Mythology
For those who follow the Mets, accepted wisdom has been that third baseman David Wright is, and deserves to be, the face of a successful franchise such as that now ensconced in its new ballpark out at Willet's Point.
I like David Wright--seems like a fine citizen. But I am not really a fan. In fact, I think he is among the most overrated good hitters in baseball.
Taking nothing away from his consistency, his .300 plus average, his 100 plus runs batted in, his 30 homers and his fine fielding, I am trying to remember the last time I saw him come up big in a big situation--or even a sort of big situation. I would have to go back to June 2006 when he drove a ball over Yankee center-fielder Johnny Damon's head to complete a wonderful comeback for the Mets. Since then, he has been a specialist at the tack-on run, the home run in a losing cause, the double with nobody on, the walk that should have been a big hit. . .and on and on (for instance, had he contributed like a gamer down the stretch in either 2007 or 2008, the Mets would have been in the playoffs both times).
I think it all changed for him when he was in the All-Star Game home-run derby back in 06 (at least I think it was that year). After that, something in his character changed. He seemed to think he was "the big star that had to produce" and put mental pressure on himself in such a way as to make him fail in those very situations where he most needed to hit. Before then, he was a really talented, focused kid having a great time. Now he just seems like a guy trying to do the right thing. It's not a character flaw, exactly, but it isn't helping the team win games.
My opinion is that the Mets should trade him. They will probably be able to get anybody they can think of naming, because most people don't know David's little secret. And I think the person they get will be more relaxed, and more clutch than our wonderfully nice but ultimately non-championship third baseman.
--Renaissance
Sunday, April 19, 2009
I like David Wright--seems like a fine citizen. But I am not really a fan. In fact, I think he is among the most overrated good hitters in baseball.
Taking nothing away from his consistency, his .300 plus average, his 100 plus runs batted in, his 30 homers and his fine fielding, I am trying to remember the last time I saw him come up big in a big situation--or even a sort of big situation. I would have to go back to June 2006 when he drove a ball over Yankee center-fielder Johnny Damon's head to complete a wonderful comeback for the Mets. Since then, he has been a specialist at the tack-on run, the home run in a losing cause, the double with nobody on, the walk that should have been a big hit. . .and on and on (for instance, had he contributed like a gamer down the stretch in either 2007 or 2008, the Mets would have been in the playoffs both times).
I think it all changed for him when he was in the All-Star Game home-run derby back in 06 (at least I think it was that year). After that, something in his character changed. He seemed to think he was "the big star that had to produce" and put mental pressure on himself in such a way as to make him fail in those very situations where he most needed to hit. Before then, he was a really talented, focused kid having a great time. Now he just seems like a guy trying to do the right thing. It's not a character flaw, exactly, but it isn't helping the team win games.
My opinion is that the Mets should trade him. They will probably be able to get anybody they can think of naming, because most people don't know David's little secret. And I think the person they get will be more relaxed, and more clutch than our wonderfully nice but ultimately non-championship third baseman.
--Renaissance
Sunday, April 19, 2009
The Other Night at the Ballpark
If a ballpark can be defined by the type of game played on its inaugural night, then the Mets' new Citi Field is going to be a comedy of errors for a long time to come. Can it be that the busted-down, bailed-out nature of its namesake bank has something to do with the rather silly doings on the field, and the unsightly loss the Mets were handed by the Padres?
Here are some of the odd, inauspicious things that happened:
-on the third pitch of the game, the opposing team hit a home run (never has happened before to inaugurate a park)
-shortly thereafter, the Met pitcher tripped and fell off the mound; then gave up four runs.
-after the Mets tied it up, a dropped ball in the outfield put a Padre on third; then an almost imperceptible balk brought home the go-ahead run
-a cat ran on the field
-a foul ball went through the screen and landed in the Mayor's lap
-the opposing catcher nearly tore a fan's head off trying to catch a ball in the stands (again, that flimsy screen)
-Duaner Sanchez, having been released by the Mets as useless, pitched an inning of scoreless relief against them.
-Heath Bell, having been traded by the Mets as useless, got the save against them.
The first day at Citi was not quite as bad as the last day at Shea (where they crumpled and lost a chance at the playoffs), but it gave it a run for its money.
Personally, I don't care how many Shake Shack burgers I can eat at the new ballpark--if the Mets don't show some spirit this year (they are 3 and 4), I am going to be looking for new things to do in the summer.
Also, not to be a terrible spoil-sport, but Jackie Robinson, while I totally respect his legacy, never played for the Mets so I am struggling to understand why they dedicated the rotunda to him. It somehow seems grafted on to the team in a wannabe kind of way. His history is as a Dodger. Why did the Mets decide to "adopt" him and I wonder what the Dodgers think of that.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Here are some of the odd, inauspicious things that happened:
-on the third pitch of the game, the opposing team hit a home run (never has happened before to inaugurate a park)
-shortly thereafter, the Met pitcher tripped and fell off the mound; then gave up four runs.
-after the Mets tied it up, a dropped ball in the outfield put a Padre on third; then an almost imperceptible balk brought home the go-ahead run
-a cat ran on the field
-a foul ball went through the screen and landed in the Mayor's lap
-the opposing catcher nearly tore a fan's head off trying to catch a ball in the stands (again, that flimsy screen)
-Duaner Sanchez, having been released by the Mets as useless, pitched an inning of scoreless relief against them.
-Heath Bell, having been traded by the Mets as useless, got the save against them.
The first day at Citi was not quite as bad as the last day at Shea (where they crumpled and lost a chance at the playoffs), but it gave it a run for its money.
Personally, I don't care how many Shake Shack burgers I can eat at the new ballpark--if the Mets don't show some spirit this year (they are 3 and 4), I am going to be looking for new things to do in the summer.
Also, not to be a terrible spoil-sport, but Jackie Robinson, while I totally respect his legacy, never played for the Mets so I am struggling to understand why they dedicated the rotunda to him. It somehow seems grafted on to the team in a wannabe kind of way. His history is as a Dodger. Why did the Mets decide to "adopt" him and I wonder what the Dodgers think of that.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Much too Close for Comfort
I have a son in college. He happens to go to SUNY Binghamton, which I am told is a pretty good school--maybe the best in the SUNY system.
The City of Binghamton is nothing much. It has all the appearance of a town that once upon a time, like so many towns in America, showed promise and gave hope to its citizens. Today it probably does no such thing--going to downtown Binghamton is a little bit like visiting the sick ward, where the healthiest denizen has just one tube up his nose and manages to walk on crutches.
Yesterday the news got worse. My son is safe. But some terrible person armed with terrible (and quite legal) weapons barricaded an immigrant assistance center in downtown Binghamton and methodically shot and killed about fourteen people. The perpetrator was apparently himself an immigrant, recently laid off.
When I first saw the news item on a web-site sidebar, it only said "several shot in Binghamton" and I dropped what I was doing and called my son. I had seen enough of these campus-shootings on TV to imagine the incident might have taken place at his school. Fortunately I woke him out of an early afternoon slumber. The murders had taken place downtown. By the time I checked the news again, the lone gunman was dead and my son was on a bus headed back home for spring break.
We keep hearing about how we're "being kept safe" from terrorists and how "there haven't been any terrorists strikes since 9/11". I say this is a naked falsehood.
On several campuses, in several community centers, in churches, in offices--at wedding celebrations--terrorists with powerful weapons have invaded peaceful gatherings and created havoc. The victims are many. We're not safe. We live in a gun-saturated nation in which life is not held nearly as dear as piety would want us to believe.
Proud to be an American? Or disgusted with the pall of multiple-death gun-violence that never seems to lift.
--Renaissance
Saturday, April 04, 2009
The City of Binghamton is nothing much. It has all the appearance of a town that once upon a time, like so many towns in America, showed promise and gave hope to its citizens. Today it probably does no such thing--going to downtown Binghamton is a little bit like visiting the sick ward, where the healthiest denizen has just one tube up his nose and manages to walk on crutches.
Yesterday the news got worse. My son is safe. But some terrible person armed with terrible (and quite legal) weapons barricaded an immigrant assistance center in downtown Binghamton and methodically shot and killed about fourteen people. The perpetrator was apparently himself an immigrant, recently laid off.
When I first saw the news item on a web-site sidebar, it only said "several shot in Binghamton" and I dropped what I was doing and called my son. I had seen enough of these campus-shootings on TV to imagine the incident might have taken place at his school. Fortunately I woke him out of an early afternoon slumber. The murders had taken place downtown. By the time I checked the news again, the lone gunman was dead and my son was on a bus headed back home for spring break.
We keep hearing about how we're "being kept safe" from terrorists and how "there haven't been any terrorists strikes since 9/11". I say this is a naked falsehood.
On several campuses, in several community centers, in churches, in offices--at wedding celebrations--terrorists with powerful weapons have invaded peaceful gatherings and created havoc. The victims are many. We're not safe. We live in a gun-saturated nation in which life is not held nearly as dear as piety would want us to believe.
Proud to be an American? Or disgusted with the pall of multiple-death gun-violence that never seems to lift.
--Renaissance
Saturday, April 04, 2009
La Didone at St. Anne's Warehouse
Smash together an opera about a transformational love affair starring Queen Dido of Carthage, together with an unspeakably bad sci-fi flick about yet another race that wants to colonize earth because its own planet is dying, video jiggery-pokery, outlandish not to say obscene costuming, live musicians, wonderful singers and madcap direction, and what do you get?
An astonishing and fun evening with the Wooster Group doing "La Didone" at St. Anne's Warehouse in Dumbo. Even a Yoda-like troll makes a brief appearance.
The two plots interweave, having nothing and everything to do with one another, the characters sometimes talk to one another from one play to the next, there is rambunctious hilarity, there is impassioned singing, there is often absolute mayhem. And yet it all comes together in some kind of post-Carthaginian, post-Twentieth Century time warp where cupids and alien vampires are equally mythical and equally effective.
The audience finds itself drawn up in the action, hardly knowing where to look, usually knowing where to laugh, and knowing it is watching one of the best and most exciting acting troupes on the planet right now, at the top of its game.
Go see it if you can: Wooster Group presents La Didone at St. Anne's Warehouse.
-Renaissance
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
I Am Not the First to Downgrade Picasso
I went to the Metropolitan Museum today and ended up perusing some of the moderns. They had several Picassos.
Is it a mark of greatness that Picasso's sum is always so much greater than his parts? Perhaps. But it may also be a sign that he was having one over on us--and persistently had the guts to pull it off.
Look at the sloppy stuff he puts up as a wreath around the woman's head, and the blobby way he plops the paint around her arms. And the cartoonish colors on the purple splotch of nude.
Look at the crudeness of the brushstrokes depicting the red-faced man with a lollipop. Surely he cannot be serious. He is saying: "Here you are--its just what I felt like doing and I am going to make you like it."
Deconstructed, his paintings nearly always fall apart--after his blue and rose periods, after his Desmoiselles, his work--from the 1930s onward--are crude, oversimplified, addled, as if by rote (yes, another plastic transformation).
Yet there is a raw power that continues to stun in spite of the fact you know you are being had. And there is no denying that, once you stand back, you see his true mastery is in composition.
You cannot look closely at his work. You have to stand back and let it emanate its power from a distance.
Do I sometimes think he was a fraud? Yes.
Do I still think his work is some of the most exciting of the 20th Century? Yes.
--Renaissance
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Is it a mark of greatness that Picasso's sum is always so much greater than his parts? Perhaps. But it may also be a sign that he was having one over on us--and persistently had the guts to pull it off.
Look at the sloppy stuff he puts up as a wreath around the woman's head, and the blobby way he plops the paint around her arms. And the cartoonish colors on the purple splotch of nude.
Look at the crudeness of the brushstrokes depicting the red-faced man with a lollipop. Surely he cannot be serious. He is saying: "Here you are--its just what I felt like doing and I am going to make you like it."
Deconstructed, his paintings nearly always fall apart--after his blue and rose periods, after his Desmoiselles, his work--from the 1930s onward--are crude, oversimplified, addled, as if by rote (yes, another plastic transformation).
Yet there is a raw power that continues to stun in spite of the fact you know you are being had. And there is no denying that, once you stand back, you see his true mastery is in composition.
You cannot look closely at his work. You have to stand back and let it emanate its power from a distance.
Do I sometimes think he was a fraud? Yes.
Do I still think his work is some of the most exciting of the 20th Century? Yes.
--Renaissance
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Could the War on Drugs be the Next Fallen Idol?
Troops are massing at the border.
You hadn't heard?
Northern Mexico has been taken over by narco-terrorists. Police captains are beheaded. Citizens are carved up like steer. They cross the border to intimidate Mexicans in the US--and Americans in the US. They are more vicious than any drug gangs we have ever seen and they're on the verge of collapsing Mexico as a nation.
To protect the most vulnerable areas in Texas, Obama is seriously considering a posting of the National Guard. There's crazy talk of poisoning the Rio Grande.
These Mexican cartels are fueled by two things: the American demand for drugs; and the American supply of weapons.
Secretary of State Clinton has stated that years of failed drug policies have led to this looming disaster, and she is right.
What's needed?
Legalization, regulation, taxation. First and foremost: decriminalization. One wave of that wand and the entire structure of drug gangs takes a severe, not to say fatal hit. And America can finally admit to its needs--can stop living in the shadows.
The tax revenue won't hurt either.
Disclaimer: I don't take illegal drugs. But I understand the damage their criminalization causes.
Let's call an end to the insane, counterproductive, wasteful War on Drugs. Now, before it's too late.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
You hadn't heard?
Northern Mexico has been taken over by narco-terrorists. Police captains are beheaded. Citizens are carved up like steer. They cross the border to intimidate Mexicans in the US--and Americans in the US. They are more vicious than any drug gangs we have ever seen and they're on the verge of collapsing Mexico as a nation.
To protect the most vulnerable areas in Texas, Obama is seriously considering a posting of the National Guard. There's crazy talk of poisoning the Rio Grande.
These Mexican cartels are fueled by two things: the American demand for drugs; and the American supply of weapons.
Secretary of State Clinton has stated that years of failed drug policies have led to this looming disaster, and she is right.
What's needed?
Legalization, regulation, taxation. First and foremost: decriminalization. One wave of that wand and the entire structure of drug gangs takes a severe, not to say fatal hit. And America can finally admit to its needs--can stop living in the shadows.
The tax revenue won't hurt either.
Disclaimer: I don't take illegal drugs. But I understand the damage their criminalization causes.
Let's call an end to the insane, counterproductive, wasteful War on Drugs. Now, before it's too late.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
I Have Never Wanted to Ski
I can't say I knew her work all that well. But I know of her mother and her husband and feel deeply for them in their hour of grief.
Of course I am talking about the late Natasha Richardson and the strange, tragic way she came to her end on a beginner's ski slope in Quebec. Apparently she fell, hopped up, joked about it, went back to the hotel and soon collapsed and died. They are calling it blunt force trauma.
It seems she was doing little of much danger on the slope, but it made me think of the one time I allowed myself to be talked into skiing--and the sense I had of the insane danger into which I was putting myself.
Thinking back, I cannot believe I did it. I will not do it again. I flew down the slope at speed, with no knowledge of how to steer, my only hope of stopping to fall awkwardly in a snow bank and hope for the best. I came away uninjured. But at any moment I might have crashed into a tree at probably thirty or forty miles an hour (just like a car wreck) with no protection whatever. Late in the day, I saw what appeared to be an experienced skier--or at least someone who dressed like one--being taken off the slope wrapped tightly into a stretcher.
Why do people want to do this? I suppose it's exhilarating to conquer the slope, a dashing figure in fancy, specialized gear. I'm not making fun of it. I just don't identify.
Skiing is really, really dangerous. I would not want my kids to do it (they don't). I would not want my wife to do it (she doesn't).
Goodbye, Natasha. I wish you had not skied.
--Renaissance
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Of course I am talking about the late Natasha Richardson and the strange, tragic way she came to her end on a beginner's ski slope in Quebec. Apparently she fell, hopped up, joked about it, went back to the hotel and soon collapsed and died. They are calling it blunt force trauma.
It seems she was doing little of much danger on the slope, but it made me think of the one time I allowed myself to be talked into skiing--and the sense I had of the insane danger into which I was putting myself.
Thinking back, I cannot believe I did it. I will not do it again. I flew down the slope at speed, with no knowledge of how to steer, my only hope of stopping to fall awkwardly in a snow bank and hope for the best. I came away uninjured. But at any moment I might have crashed into a tree at probably thirty or forty miles an hour (just like a car wreck) with no protection whatever. Late in the day, I saw what appeared to be an experienced skier--or at least someone who dressed like one--being taken off the slope wrapped tightly into a stretcher.
Why do people want to do this? I suppose it's exhilarating to conquer the slope, a dashing figure in fancy, specialized gear. I'm not making fun of it. I just don't identify.
Skiing is really, really dangerous. I would not want my kids to do it (they don't). I would not want my wife to do it (she doesn't).
Goodbye, Natasha. I wish you had not skied.
--Renaissance
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Notes from a Newsbreak
I am a news junkie.
In a typical day I will read The NY Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, the CNN site, Alternet, Huffington Post, Politico, Yahoo News and watch Hardball, Countdown and Rachel Maddow. Then I might watch The Daily Show. Often I read the Daily News on the subway.
Lately this has become a problem.
That's because the news is so terrible these days. Rather than read the details about February's dismal job numbers, I have decided to pull back--make an attempt at seeing if "out of sight, out of mind" might actually help to improve my mood.
So far, so good.
I am also a fan of old magazines. During my newsbreak I was looking through a Time magazine from September of 1964 and noticed the following, which I had never known: during this week, less than a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there were television premieres of "Bewitched", "The Addams Family", "Flipper", "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and "Mr. Magoo". Is it any wonder why network television held all the marbles back then? Not to be too badly outclassed, in theaters that week were "A Hard Day's Night" and "Night of the Iguana".
Goldwater was running against Johnson. Hubert Humphrey was a brash young up-and-comer. Youths had rioted at Seaside Oregon and crime was headed up dramatically almost everywhere.
Last night I also watched three submarine movies in a row on Turner Classic Movies. I was trying to think of something that didn't have the words "stock market" and "tanking" in it--and thanks to William Holden, Rock Hudson and Clark Gable, I was able to do so.
My advice for these fun-filled times: stop looking. Go about your work. Feel good about yourself. This too shall pass--probably sooner than you can imagine. After all, even though every sentient adult in the United States is currently feeling like they have a spike driven through their head on account of the economy, at some point our native insatiability for goods and services is going to kick in and we will be firing up the markets again.
In the meantime, here's to cluelessness.
--Renaissance
Saturday, March 07, 2009
In a typical day I will read The NY Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, the CNN site, Alternet, Huffington Post, Politico, Yahoo News and watch Hardball, Countdown and Rachel Maddow. Then I might watch The Daily Show. Often I read the Daily News on the subway.
Lately this has become a problem.
That's because the news is so terrible these days. Rather than read the details about February's dismal job numbers, I have decided to pull back--make an attempt at seeing if "out of sight, out of mind" might actually help to improve my mood.
So far, so good.
I am also a fan of old magazines. During my newsbreak I was looking through a Time magazine from September of 1964 and noticed the following, which I had never known: during this week, less than a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there were television premieres of "Bewitched", "The Addams Family", "Flipper", "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and "Mr. Magoo". Is it any wonder why network television held all the marbles back then? Not to be too badly outclassed, in theaters that week were "A Hard Day's Night" and "Night of the Iguana".
Goldwater was running against Johnson. Hubert Humphrey was a brash young up-and-comer. Youths had rioted at Seaside Oregon and crime was headed up dramatically almost everywhere.
Last night I also watched three submarine movies in a row on Turner Classic Movies. I was trying to think of something that didn't have the words "stock market" and "tanking" in it--and thanks to William Holden, Rock Hudson and Clark Gable, I was able to do so.
My advice for these fun-filled times: stop looking. Go about your work. Feel good about yourself. This too shall pass--probably sooner than you can imagine. After all, even though every sentient adult in the United States is currently feeling like they have a spike driven through their head on account of the economy, at some point our native insatiability for goods and services is going to kick in and we will be firing up the markets again.
In the meantime, here's to cluelessness.
--Renaissance
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Wide Screen Stretch Marks
I am sure it will all be okay once every channel broadcasts in HD.
But I can't help feeling like there's a strain of visual moronism at work when we see so many folks watching narrow-screen shows stretched out wide to fill the pixels of wide-screen televisions. Maybe it's the insufferable aesthete in me, but can anyone tell me why it isn't cause for complaint when, say, the local bar shows you a ballgame where the item in question is no longer a ball, but a weird ovoid? And where everyone looks squatter and fatter? I thought we were the nation of "thinner is better", so it makes even less sense than otherwise. Or maybe people secretly feel they'd rather see TV stars fatter, since it makes them feel less corpulent themselves?
It's unaccountable. One school of thought is that many viewers don't notice. Another is that they feel like they'd be wasting screen space by not stretching a narrow show to fill the wide screen.
I am sure this ought to be far, far down the list of things that get under one's collar these days, or maybe its because of these days that I find myself bothered more by small signs of mediocrity or capitulation.
In either case, I applaud the arrival of universal HD--only partly because it's kind of stunning in and of itself. It's also a rescue from incipient visual moronism.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
But I can't help feeling like there's a strain of visual moronism at work when we see so many folks watching narrow-screen shows stretched out wide to fill the pixels of wide-screen televisions. Maybe it's the insufferable aesthete in me, but can anyone tell me why it isn't cause for complaint when, say, the local bar shows you a ballgame where the item in question is no longer a ball, but a weird ovoid? And where everyone looks squatter and fatter? I thought we were the nation of "thinner is better", so it makes even less sense than otherwise. Or maybe people secretly feel they'd rather see TV stars fatter, since it makes them feel less corpulent themselves?
It's unaccountable. One school of thought is that many viewers don't notice. Another is that they feel like they'd be wasting screen space by not stretching a narrow show to fill the wide screen.
I am sure this ought to be far, far down the list of things that get under one's collar these days, or maybe its because of these days that I find myself bothered more by small signs of mediocrity or capitulation.
In either case, I applaud the arrival of universal HD--only partly because it's kind of stunning in and of itself. It's also a rescue from incipient visual moronism.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
"Network"--a Latter Day Appreciation
One of its scenes is iconic.
It's the one where disgraced newscaster Howard Beale exhorts his network audience to stick their heads out the window and shout "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!!!"
I streamed the 1976 classic "Network" last night on Netflix (what a cool service--instant movies on your flatscreen!). And I was reminded why I had found the movie so surprising and stimulating when I first saw it at a big old movie palace in Seattle back when it came out: then, as now, it came across as both outraged and literate; tough and grounded; and now even moreso than then, in so many ways prescient about the fate of news and information in our plugged-in society.
More or less, it's about a newscaster at a failing network who, having had a nervous breakdown on the air, is exploited for entertainment value while still doing the news. Eventually he is terminated because people tire of his twisted shenanigans.
Beyond the well-written script (Paddy Chayefsky) and the bravura performances by Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall (what a cast!), the film remains a standout for its biting satire about the hucksterism driving that most self-serious of professions: television news. When it came out, the scenes it presented came across as wild, even preposterous: glitzy, circus-like newscasts? Who'd have thought they'd ever really dare!
Now we can see it was in the cards all along. Never mind the Fox News calamity--where fantasy and propaganda are presented as fact with Goebbelsesque audacity--even the news liberals watch (Olbermann, Maddow, Stewart, Colbert) is hopped up with entertainment features. How else do you explain Keith's "Worst Persons in the World" (which I much enjoy) or Maddow's "Scrub, Rinse, Repeat" (which I also enjoy); each crafted with enough news to be news, but enough guff to be fun? And Colbert especially has leeched out pretty much all the actual news from the show, replacing it (mercifully) with heavy doses of subversive hijinks. And guess what: we love it!
In "Network" the formula seemed to work: Howard Beale's news-hour-of-madness was a big success for a time. The suggestion wasn't all that fantastical. Just a few years ahead of its time.
--Renaissance
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Of the Thinness of Print
Recently a family member accepted a subscription to the New Yorker. The first issue that came seemed hardly a magazine in thickness--more like a brochure. Missing were the pages and pages of ads that used to fatten the most successful (and some of the not-so-successful) print magazines (remember Wired?--it was like a phone book in the 90's).
When you buy the NY Times these days, it feels miniaturized and sadly less relevant than the heavy, inky, no-color Newspaper of Record from a decade ago. The Times has of course become smaller and smaller in width (so has Rolling Stone succumbed) but lately it seems they too have been abandoned by their advertisers, and the paper is not just small these days, but thin. Can we say scrawny?
It isn't just the economy.
The news--if it is news--about non-broadcast advertising is that it's moving heavily, rapidly on-line. Partly this is because it's awfully cheap to run ads on line and partly because it is very possible to track the success--not the focus-group success, but the actual success--of an ad. An advertiser can know if its on-line ad is driving desired actions--use the coupon, buy the shoes, book the ticket, download the pdf--in a way that it can never hope to do with its universe of print.
The other part is, of course, about the economy.
As companies look for efficiencies (and knowing they cannot simply disappear from the brand marketplace), they don't think "two-page spread" anymore. They think--perhaps--"interactive module" or "social media launch for hope-to-become-viral video". If they weren't looking for ways to find any port in an economic Nor'easter, these advertisers would probably put money behind both print and on-line. But mostly, they're not putting money into print like they used to.
The big names will survive in print for a while, but I think the end of the print versions of most newspapers and many magazines may be a little bit more than a dot on the publishing horizon. The future will have thousands of interesting "print" venues--blogs, twitterings, facebook pages, new on-line information cocktails as yet undreamed--and it will include great news sites from the great Eastern Seaboard newspapers that have not decimated their reporting staffs--but if you think about Newseek (for instance) turning itself into something other than a newsweekly, you can't help but figure that the next few years will include the end of inky publishing as we have come to know it.
--Renaissance
Sunday, February 22, 2009
When you buy the NY Times these days, it feels miniaturized and sadly less relevant than the heavy, inky, no-color Newspaper of Record from a decade ago. The Times has of course become smaller and smaller in width (so has Rolling Stone succumbed) but lately it seems they too have been abandoned by their advertisers, and the paper is not just small these days, but thin. Can we say scrawny?
It isn't just the economy.
The news--if it is news--about non-broadcast advertising is that it's moving heavily, rapidly on-line. Partly this is because it's awfully cheap to run ads on line and partly because it is very possible to track the success--not the focus-group success, but the actual success--of an ad. An advertiser can know if its on-line ad is driving desired actions--use the coupon, buy the shoes, book the ticket, download the pdf--in a way that it can never hope to do with its universe of print.
The other part is, of course, about the economy.
As companies look for efficiencies (and knowing they cannot simply disappear from the brand marketplace), they don't think "two-page spread" anymore. They think--perhaps--"interactive module" or "social media launch for hope-to-become-viral video". If they weren't looking for ways to find any port in an economic Nor'easter, these advertisers would probably put money behind both print and on-line. But mostly, they're not putting money into print like they used to.
The big names will survive in print for a while, but I think the end of the print versions of most newspapers and many magazines may be a little bit more than a dot on the publishing horizon. The future will have thousands of interesting "print" venues--blogs, twitterings, facebook pages, new on-line information cocktails as yet undreamed--and it will include great news sites from the great Eastern Seaboard newspapers that have not decimated their reporting staffs--but if you think about Newseek (for instance) turning itself into something other than a newsweekly, you can't help but figure that the next few years will include the end of inky publishing as we have come to know it.
--Renaissance
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Octomom
Did you hear about how Obama's stimulus bill includes $17 billion dollars for high-speed rail? Have we gotten excited enough about that yet? It may mean NY-Chicago in a few hours; SFO-LA daytrips--and energy efficiency!
But this post is not about that.
It's about Nadya Suleman, the mother-of-fourteen-including-recent-in-vitro-octuplets that everyone from Keith Olbermann to his nemesis Billo the Clown have been attacking without mercy.
The last word I used was "mercy", as in "have some".
I watched her NBC interview prepared to find much to loathe in a person who seemed almost limitlessly self-centered and irresponsible. I came away hoping the Suleman family gets all the help it needs, because it is going to need plenty.
That Nadya is broke, and possibly a delusional Jolie-wannabe (what's with the puffy lips you didn't used to have?) is almost beside the point. Operating on a consistent, if perhaps ruinously misguided inner logic, Ms. Suleman has executed a plan the results of which she seems almost preternaturally thrilled. How many of us can boast either the plan or the guts (in her case literally) to make the plan real in the sense that eight babies and six other kids are real?
She comes off as an unlikely heroine of sorts. Taking the notion of female empowerment and not only turning it on its head (who'd a thunk it might involve extreme fertility of all things?) but playing it out to its logical extreme, she has almost created a baffling, troubling new paradigm for the so-called "culture of life". Both liberals (all those babies--eww!) and conservatives (who's going to pay for this!!!) seem completely put off their game by her actions.
My next question is: where are the Christians when they are clearly called for?
Let's go back to that "culture of life" stuff for a moment. Here is a woman who literally refused to let even one potential embryo die--who instead wanted all of them to enjoy what she calls "the gift of life". How is this so very different from Christian dogma? Or are they going to quibble with her use of technology to build those babies? Or are they standing off to the side because her name sounds Muslim and that she's probably bonkers?
I am guessing Ms. Suleman will somehow make out okay with her ridiculously large brood of future executives and philanthropists. Just as she figured out how to build the nation's most famous family of fatherless children, she will somehow stumble into the money to keep them all fed (and apparently obtain a graduate degree while doing so!).
In a weird, unfathomable way, she has impressed me--hats off, I guess.
Christians? Time to make it real. I am sure you know how to get in touch.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
But this post is not about that.
It's about Nadya Suleman, the mother-of-fourteen-including-recent-in-vitro-octuplets that everyone from Keith Olbermann to his nemesis Billo the Clown have been attacking without mercy.
The last word I used was "mercy", as in "have some".
I watched her NBC interview prepared to find much to loathe in a person who seemed almost limitlessly self-centered and irresponsible. I came away hoping the Suleman family gets all the help it needs, because it is going to need plenty.
That Nadya is broke, and possibly a delusional Jolie-wannabe (what's with the puffy lips you didn't used to have?) is almost beside the point. Operating on a consistent, if perhaps ruinously misguided inner logic, Ms. Suleman has executed a plan the results of which she seems almost preternaturally thrilled. How many of us can boast either the plan or the guts (in her case literally) to make the plan real in the sense that eight babies and six other kids are real?
She comes off as an unlikely heroine of sorts. Taking the notion of female empowerment and not only turning it on its head (who'd a thunk it might involve extreme fertility of all things?) but playing it out to its logical extreme, she has almost created a baffling, troubling new paradigm for the so-called "culture of life". Both liberals (all those babies--eww!) and conservatives (who's going to pay for this!!!) seem completely put off their game by her actions.
My next question is: where are the Christians when they are clearly called for?
Let's go back to that "culture of life" stuff for a moment. Here is a woman who literally refused to let even one potential embryo die--who instead wanted all of them to enjoy what she calls "the gift of life". How is this so very different from Christian dogma? Or are they going to quibble with her use of technology to build those babies? Or are they standing off to the side because her name sounds Muslim and that she's probably bonkers?
I am guessing Ms. Suleman will somehow make out okay with her ridiculously large brood of future executives and philanthropists. Just as she figured out how to build the nation's most famous family of fatherless children, she will somehow stumble into the money to keep them all fed (and apparently obtain a graduate degree while doing so!).
In a weird, unfathomable way, she has impressed me--hats off, I guess.
Christians? Time to make it real. I am sure you know how to get in touch.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
A Rapid End to Bipartisanship
Am I the only one who feels like the withdrawal of Judd Gregg as Commerce nominee represents the last nail in the tiny, infant coffin of Obama's hope for bipartisanship? Is it really much of a secret that once he was told he would not be able to manipulate the census in order not to count minorities (denying big, liberal cities the additional representatives they deserve in Congress), the Republican from New Hampshire lost his taste for the job?
In my opinion bipartisanship may have been--maybe still is--a dream Obama actually believes in, and it sure helped him get elected (many Americans continue to imagine they are "one").
I am glad he reached out some, if only to prove the GOP is run by dead-enders.
America is not "one". The divides are deep. The general profile of belief and custom in America's Northeast, its West Coast and some better educated places in between are more different from, say, a place like Tennessee (rapid apologies in advance to the educated and reasonable folks therefrom), than Switzerland is from Italy. The differing political and social climates between these regions are not going to permit much bipartisanship, if any (my pet theory is that fundamentalist Christianity is a major culprit, but that is another subject).
The GOP is, by all appearances, determined to see the nation fail under a Democrat. The reason for this is because each elected GOP politician seems to believe that a Democrat-led failure may at some point lead to a re-establishment of the neo-con Caliphate. This quixotic notion has rather more currency than the hopes and dreams of the Bourbons in Spain, but not that much more. The feisty behavior of the Republican party in these opening days of the Obama administration is, using a market term for a stock headed permanently south, nothing more than a dead-cat bounce.
For their part, elected Dems tend to be chickenhearted apologists for the regime (status quo benefits them too).
Who knows--maybe Obama wears everyone down with constant likeability and gets the GOP, still fiercely in denial of its own disgrace, to sing with him 'round the campfire. But I kind of doubt it.
--Renaissance
Friday, February 13, 2009
In my opinion bipartisanship may have been--maybe still is--a dream Obama actually believes in, and it sure helped him get elected (many Americans continue to imagine they are "one").
I am glad he reached out some, if only to prove the GOP is run by dead-enders.
America is not "one". The divides are deep. The general profile of belief and custom in America's Northeast, its West Coast and some better educated places in between are more different from, say, a place like Tennessee (rapid apologies in advance to the educated and reasonable folks therefrom), than Switzerland is from Italy. The differing political and social climates between these regions are not going to permit much bipartisanship, if any (my pet theory is that fundamentalist Christianity is a major culprit, but that is another subject).
The GOP is, by all appearances, determined to see the nation fail under a Democrat. The reason for this is because each elected GOP politician seems to believe that a Democrat-led failure may at some point lead to a re-establishment of the neo-con Caliphate. This quixotic notion has rather more currency than the hopes and dreams of the Bourbons in Spain, but not that much more. The feisty behavior of the Republican party in these opening days of the Obama administration is, using a market term for a stock headed permanently south, nothing more than a dead-cat bounce.
For their part, elected Dems tend to be chickenhearted apologists for the regime (status quo benefits them too).
Who knows--maybe Obama wears everyone down with constant likeability and gets the GOP, still fiercely in denial of its own disgrace, to sing with him 'round the campfire. But I kind of doubt it.
--Renaissance
Friday, February 13, 2009
Yank-roids
Here in New York, in the summer, there is a Great Divide among those of us who follow the American Pastime. On the one side and in the majority are the eternally gloating, black-hatted fans of the team resident in the Bronx with their 26 trophies. On the other are the blue-hatted minority (but a considerable one) with their less-than-lovable wanna-be team trying to stay relevant in a swampy part of of town called (unbecomingly) Flushing.
I mention this in order to point out that the once-mighty Bronx team, manned in its heyday by graceful, iconic figures that held home-run trophies in one hand and hot dogs in the other; that swatted hits in more games running than some players get hits in a season (and later marrying Marilyn Monroe); that played drunk but hit balls way out past the train station anyway; that said "Holy Cow" and somehow managed to be in the middle of every winner; that caught more winning World Series games than anyone, ever, and was maybe more quotable than Walt Whitman; that played in more games consecutive than anyone in his day and then gave an iconic speech (again, as quotable as any of the greats of history) when gravely ill; that, though temperamental, shot World-Series home-runs in preternatural succession and, to be fair and more recent, somehow found ways to jump into the stands or race across foul lines to save games when they mattered--this team (the iconic one from the Bronx, not the pale imitation of a winner from Flushing)--has now become the home of not one or two, but at least four superstars who have admitted or been all-but-convicted of cheating by using a combination of banned substances known as steroids.
Didn't we--the non-Bronx-club-fans--always feel (or anyhow at least in the last few years and certainly since one of the black-hatted, pumped-up 'roidmeisters tried to attack our star catcher with the sharp sliver of a bat) that something was just plain wrong with the Yanks? Didn't it seem like some kind of bad-faith for the gloating gloaters to gloat so gloatingly over the artificially enhanced feats of their mega-wealthy, jack-ass "superstars" (you know who they are); and didn't it seem not just like a fitting let-down when the team couldn't manage to get past the first round of the playoffs, but some kind of cosmic justice?
And can it seem like anything but the final disgrace for it now to be revealed, much as we had all suspected but could not more than insinuate, that even the tiny-man-in-a-big-body called A-Rod has now been revealed as a fake, a sham, a cock-up, a puffed and coiffed and juice-injected rip-off?
Not that the Flushing flops have a lock on dignity. But has it not seemed for quite some time--admit it now--that the team of 26 Championships had, over the past several years, not only lost its mojo, but become, even while "winning", a sorry, shameful, empty fraud?
And can we now be forgiven for feeling like fans of said fraudulent enterprise perhaps should own up to this fact and at least stop the gloating?
--Renaissance
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
I mention this in order to point out that the once-mighty Bronx team, manned in its heyday by graceful, iconic figures that held home-run trophies in one hand and hot dogs in the other; that swatted hits in more games running than some players get hits in a season (and later marrying Marilyn Monroe); that played drunk but hit balls way out past the train station anyway; that said "Holy Cow" and somehow managed to be in the middle of every winner; that caught more winning World Series games than anyone, ever, and was maybe more quotable than Walt Whitman; that played in more games consecutive than anyone in his day and then gave an iconic speech (again, as quotable as any of the greats of history) when gravely ill; that, though temperamental, shot World-Series home-runs in preternatural succession and, to be fair and more recent, somehow found ways to jump into the stands or race across foul lines to save games when they mattered--this team (the iconic one from the Bronx, not the pale imitation of a winner from Flushing)--has now become the home of not one or two, but at least four superstars who have admitted or been all-but-convicted of cheating by using a combination of banned substances known as steroids.
Didn't we--the non-Bronx-club-fans--always feel (or anyhow at least in the last few years and certainly since one of the black-hatted, pumped-up 'roidmeisters tried to attack our star catcher with the sharp sliver of a bat) that something was just plain wrong with the Yanks? Didn't it seem like some kind of bad-faith for the gloating gloaters to gloat so gloatingly over the artificially enhanced feats of their mega-wealthy, jack-ass "superstars" (you know who they are); and didn't it seem not just like a fitting let-down when the team couldn't manage to get past the first round of the playoffs, but some kind of cosmic justice?
And can it seem like anything but the final disgrace for it now to be revealed, much as we had all suspected but could not more than insinuate, that even the tiny-man-in-a-big-body called A-Rod has now been revealed as a fake, a sham, a cock-up, a puffed and coiffed and juice-injected rip-off?
Not that the Flushing flops have a lock on dignity. But has it not seemed for quite some time--admit it now--that the team of 26 Championships had, over the past several years, not only lost its mojo, but become, even while "winning", a sorry, shameful, empty fraud?
And can we now be forgiven for feeling like fans of said fraudulent enterprise perhaps should own up to this fact and at least stop the gloating?
--Renaissance
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Calling Their Bluff
Today the poker game came to an end.
I am talking about the one where failed-company executives kept bluffing there was no way they could accept a mortal's wage and still show up to work in the morning. The one where failed-company executives pretended they had options--that they "might leave" if not paid crazy sums despite their stewardship of spectacular failure. The one where they pretended they were somehow indispensable to their companies' success when in fact they were at best irrelevant to it and more likely inimical to it.
Today, President Obama--buoyed by Senator Claire McCaskill's proposal and a wave of popular revulsion--called their bluff. In the manner of a certain baseball-team owner from long ago who offered less money in a player's contract renewal after the team did rather poorly in the prior season, Obama in essence said to the tarnished titans: "We can finish last without you."
He told them that if they were going to accept government money to keep their companies from going under, they were going to have to cap their salaries at $500,000 per year. He called the offending high pay-rates "bad strategy". I would quibble with that (for instance, strategy for whom?), but I'd rather give him credit for finally saying "Show me your cards." Word is, they don't have a hand among them.
It was always a game of three card monte--without the cops. And while the profits were there, who'd have paid it much mind? We were all getting along okay. As Americans, we don't enjoy looking too closely at the other guy's ledger. But now we're all hurting. And the crafty executives, having arranged to be given billions by taxpayers, noticed no rules governing use of the money! They took it and socked it away in the Cayman Islands, many of them did. Those who took, don't have to give it back. Oops!
But that was then--under a different, long-gone administration (whose was it?--I've forgotten). And now the great leaders of finance have been put on notice: there's such a thing as the marketplace of ideas. And their ideas--the ones where they tank the economy and sock away bonuses as if delivering value--have been exposed as bankrupt. Kind of like their companies.
There's a certain symmetry to it.
Masters of the Universe: welcome to the world.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
I am talking about the one where failed-company executives kept bluffing there was no way they could accept a mortal's wage and still show up to work in the morning. The one where failed-company executives pretended they had options--that they "might leave" if not paid crazy sums despite their stewardship of spectacular failure. The one where they pretended they were somehow indispensable to their companies' success when in fact they were at best irrelevant to it and more likely inimical to it.
Today, President Obama--buoyed by Senator Claire McCaskill's proposal and a wave of popular revulsion--called their bluff. In the manner of a certain baseball-team owner from long ago who offered less money in a player's contract renewal after the team did rather poorly in the prior season, Obama in essence said to the tarnished titans: "We can finish last without you."
He told them that if they were going to accept government money to keep their companies from going under, they were going to have to cap their salaries at $500,000 per year. He called the offending high pay-rates "bad strategy". I would quibble with that (for instance, strategy for whom?), but I'd rather give him credit for finally saying "Show me your cards." Word is, they don't have a hand among them.
It was always a game of three card monte--without the cops. And while the profits were there, who'd have paid it much mind? We were all getting along okay. As Americans, we don't enjoy looking too closely at the other guy's ledger. But now we're all hurting. And the crafty executives, having arranged to be given billions by taxpayers, noticed no rules governing use of the money! They took it and socked it away in the Cayman Islands, many of them did. Those who took, don't have to give it back. Oops!
But that was then--under a different, long-gone administration (whose was it?--I've forgotten). And now the great leaders of finance have been put on notice: there's such a thing as the marketplace of ideas. And their ideas--the ones where they tank the economy and sock away bonuses as if delivering value--have been exposed as bankrupt. Kind of like their companies.
There's a certain symmetry to it.
Masters of the Universe: welcome to the world.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
In Praise of Pork
The New York Times today reports that the Metropolitan Transit Authority expects to receive over four-hundred million dollars from the Obama stimulus package in order to complete one of its moribund holes in the ground: the Fulton Transit Center.
This is great news for any of the millions who pass through this currently warren-like, construction-hobbled, George Tooker-esque gateway to one of the great commercial hubs of the world (I am referring to Lower Manhattan).
Every Republican that can fog a mirror will deride it as "pork".
To the no-tax, bleed-the-government-white crowd, pretty much any item that a tax dollar might be spent on, especially those producing tangible results like buildings, bridges and child care programs are cursed as the political incarnation of something that snorts, rolls in mud and stinks.
It's the Republican way of letting folks know government can't be bothered with doing anything of value. Build a planetarium in Chicago (so kids can see stars)? Pork! Renovate the lawn on the Washington Mall (and employ lots of landscapers)? Pork! Study a debilitating disease by testing a mutation of it on fruit flies (curing thousands of sufferers)? Frivolous, pointy-headed pork!
I want to call an end to Pork-bashing. Sure--let's not spend money on nuisance projects--like, for instance, the NSA domestic spy program (or paying Blackwater's invoice)!--but since we're going to get taxed no matter what, how about we spend the money on some seriously porky stuff. Like libraries, maybe, or transit centers. I can smell the bacon just by thinking about it.
--Renaissance
Friday, January 30, 2009
This is great news for any of the millions who pass through this currently warren-like, construction-hobbled, George Tooker-esque gateway to one of the great commercial hubs of the world (I am referring to Lower Manhattan).
Every Republican that can fog a mirror will deride it as "pork".
To the no-tax, bleed-the-government-white crowd, pretty much any item that a tax dollar might be spent on, especially those producing tangible results like buildings, bridges and child care programs are cursed as the political incarnation of something that snorts, rolls in mud and stinks.
It's the Republican way of letting folks know government can't be bothered with doing anything of value. Build a planetarium in Chicago (so kids can see stars)? Pork! Renovate the lawn on the Washington Mall (and employ lots of landscapers)? Pork! Study a debilitating disease by testing a mutation of it on fruit flies (curing thousands of sufferers)? Frivolous, pointy-headed pork!
I want to call an end to Pork-bashing. Sure--let's not spend money on nuisance projects--like, for instance, the NSA domestic spy program (or paying Blackwater's invoice)!--but since we're going to get taxed no matter what, how about we spend the money on some seriously porky stuff. Like libraries, maybe, or transit centers. I can smell the bacon just by thinking about it.
--Renaissance
Friday, January 30, 2009
A Predictable Updike Appreciation?
Is it true, as All-Poets-are-Thieves says, that David Foster Wallace took a hatchet to Updike? I confess not to have known.
Sad they are both gone--but having paid full price for the hardcover, I couldn't get through ten pages of "Infinite Jest" without feeling I was being held up like a liquor store in a bad neighborhood.
Updike at his best--Rabbit, Run and and Rabbit Redux--was one of those writers who, if you were also a writer, made you sweat. How did he get verbs to do so much work for him (as in "rain sobbing down") without seeming to work very hard? How did he manage to make soaring prose out of ordinary, even tawdry material? For this reader, Updike, when he was in his element, nailed mid-century America the way a lepidopterist tacks butterflies to a board.
Sure, I couldn't really get through "Brazil" and barely wanted to know who did what in "Couples" and kind of couldn't give a hoot about Bech and his Book: but if you haven't tucked into "Of the Farm" or the Rabbits or the Centaurs, you've missed out on what post-WW2 America really felt like (or at least it seems so to a nearly too-young-to-know boomer).
And yes, I too liked reading his occasional New Yorker essay as long as I was able to keep from picturing him writing from somewhere in Connecticut clad in white shoes.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Sad they are both gone--but having paid full price for the hardcover, I couldn't get through ten pages of "Infinite Jest" without feeling I was being held up like a liquor store in a bad neighborhood.
Updike at his best--Rabbit, Run and and Rabbit Redux--was one of those writers who, if you were also a writer, made you sweat. How did he get verbs to do so much work for him (as in "rain sobbing down") without seeming to work very hard? How did he manage to make soaring prose out of ordinary, even tawdry material? For this reader, Updike, when he was in his element, nailed mid-century America the way a lepidopterist tacks butterflies to a board.
Sure, I couldn't really get through "Brazil" and barely wanted to know who did what in "Couples" and kind of couldn't give a hoot about Bech and his Book: but if you haven't tucked into "Of the Farm" or the Rabbits or the Centaurs, you've missed out on what post-WW2 America really felt like (or at least it seems so to a nearly too-young-to-know boomer).
And yes, I too liked reading his occasional New Yorker essay as long as I was able to keep from picturing him writing from somewhere in Connecticut clad in white shoes.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Das All, Kapital?
With the inauguration of President Obama, our nation finds its collective eyes misted over with hope: for what?
Are we hoping that, putting childish things aside, we can rise above the moronism that has gripped the Republic since Reagan cast his gimlet eye upon "the elite"? We are, most fervently.
Do we hope that, refusing false choices, we don't continue to run the Constitution through a shredder in the vain pursuit of every last person who wants to harm us? We do.
Or are we hoping, most of all, that Obama figures out a way for Capitalism to survive its current bout of double pneumonia/tuberculosis/polio/river-blindness/yaws/hookworm/food-poisoning? We are--most of all.
The rest of the above are all quite wonderful to contemplate (that, and the first African-American President to boot); but this is serious.
They are talking about spending a trillion dollars--that's in addition to the remaining 325 billion from the first panicked bailout. And they are saying it might not work. If a trillion-plus doesn't work, how much do we have left in the tank? Another trillion? Won't the mint run out of paper and ink pretty soon after that?
Think what might have happened if the Soviets hadn't taken the Reagan bait--hadn't blown their meager savings on missiles they'd never be able to use--and lasted another twenty years or so? They'd have lived long enough to see the mighty capitalist tiger now weak as a kitten, waiting for the taxpayer to feed it thin gruel through an eyedropper.
The world of capital is in denial.
Guys: it's over. Your debt-to-asset ratios are unrecoverable.
The new lending institution is going to be the government. That's called socialism.
Much as a certain cartoon pig used to say: "Da-da-da-da-da-da Das All, Kapital."
--Renaissance
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Are we hoping that, putting childish things aside, we can rise above the moronism that has gripped the Republic since Reagan cast his gimlet eye upon "the elite"? We are, most fervently.
Do we hope that, refusing false choices, we don't continue to run the Constitution through a shredder in the vain pursuit of every last person who wants to harm us? We do.
Or are we hoping, most of all, that Obama figures out a way for Capitalism to survive its current bout of double pneumonia/tuberculosis/polio/river-blindness/yaws/hookworm/food-poisoning? We are--most of all.
The rest of the above are all quite wonderful to contemplate (that, and the first African-American President to boot); but this is serious.
They are talking about spending a trillion dollars--that's in addition to the remaining 325 billion from the first panicked bailout. And they are saying it might not work. If a trillion-plus doesn't work, how much do we have left in the tank? Another trillion? Won't the mint run out of paper and ink pretty soon after that?
Think what might have happened if the Soviets hadn't taken the Reagan bait--hadn't blown their meager savings on missiles they'd never be able to use--and lasted another twenty years or so? They'd have lived long enough to see the mighty capitalist tiger now weak as a kitten, waiting for the taxpayer to feed it thin gruel through an eyedropper.
The world of capital is in denial.
Guys: it's over. Your debt-to-asset ratios are unrecoverable.
The new lending institution is going to be the government. That's called socialism.
Much as a certain cartoon pig used to say: "Da-da-da-da-da-da Das All, Kapital."
--Renaissance
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Wintry Rant
When we launched The Tempest, our tag line included the phrase I've chosen as an entry title. Today, with the temperature in New York struggling towards 7 degrees Fahrenheit (!), is the time for my actual wintry rant.
I hate winter.
I have often wondered why, many centuries past--even millienia past--any sane human, with all the Mediterranean relatively unpopulated (at a time when it is written that even places like Algeria and Libya were flowering), would have ended up in a place like, say, New York. Or Kamchatka. Or, may the gods of Ikea forgive, Sweden. Were they banished by more brutish, beachy types? Was there a shortage of fresh water in overly sunny climes? Or were they tricked into a life in the North by having arrived in summer, only to be trapped by snow and ice--and then decided, perhaps--"Well, the heck with it. It's miserable here, but no one will bother us and there's lots of elk."
By the time the Pilgrims got booted out of England for being too narrowminded, their ending up in a cold place almost made sense as long as you understood they neither had any idea where they were headed nor any reliable navigation. That they washed up on the shore of a place with weather as righteously miserable as Boston was their dumb misfortune. That we have a national holiday more or less celebrating their survival through that first icy winter tells us much about how pathetic was their weather-eye.
I have read where settlers in Canada continually complained to the Crown that it was simply too cold to do anything at all between October and May. We all know this is why Canada had a population of not more than several dozen people even as late as the 1960s.
As for New York: they talk of deep harbors, of strong bedrock for buildings, of its relatively mild climate (ocean-warmed without the gusts) compared with other places at a similarly northern latitude. Whatever. During winter around these parts, you can die out there--say, if your car breaks down in the wrong snowy hollow. Howcome all the settlers didn't just flock to, say, North Carolina--or Miami?
Maybe some folks preferred dressing in moose-skin to sweating like hogs all year--and Miami was even more pestilential then (and in a different way) than it is now. Air-conditioning changed all that--made what were the swamps and deserts of our nation into resorts.
But still--I keep picturing humankind in a younger day, migrating up out of the warm African sun, camping, scantily-clad, near what is now Monte Carlo, building their huts out of bones and skin; and thinking--"gee, I would really love to freeze my ass. I think I'll keep pushing north". It does not add up.
--Renaissance
Saturday, January 17, 2009
I hate winter.
I have often wondered why, many centuries past--even millienia past--any sane human, with all the Mediterranean relatively unpopulated (at a time when it is written that even places like Algeria and Libya were flowering), would have ended up in a place like, say, New York. Or Kamchatka. Or, may the gods of Ikea forgive, Sweden. Were they banished by more brutish, beachy types? Was there a shortage of fresh water in overly sunny climes? Or were they tricked into a life in the North by having arrived in summer, only to be trapped by snow and ice--and then decided, perhaps--"Well, the heck with it. It's miserable here, but no one will bother us and there's lots of elk."
By the time the Pilgrims got booted out of England for being too narrowminded, their ending up in a cold place almost made sense as long as you understood they neither had any idea where they were headed nor any reliable navigation. That they washed up on the shore of a place with weather as righteously miserable as Boston was their dumb misfortune. That we have a national holiday more or less celebrating their survival through that first icy winter tells us much about how pathetic was their weather-eye.
I have read where settlers in Canada continually complained to the Crown that it was simply too cold to do anything at all between October and May. We all know this is why Canada had a population of not more than several dozen people even as late as the 1960s.
As for New York: they talk of deep harbors, of strong bedrock for buildings, of its relatively mild climate (ocean-warmed without the gusts) compared with other places at a similarly northern latitude. Whatever. During winter around these parts, you can die out there--say, if your car breaks down in the wrong snowy hollow. Howcome all the settlers didn't just flock to, say, North Carolina--or Miami?
Maybe some folks preferred dressing in moose-skin to sweating like hogs all year--and Miami was even more pestilential then (and in a different way) than it is now. Air-conditioning changed all that--made what were the swamps and deserts of our nation into resorts.
But still--I keep picturing humankind in a younger day, migrating up out of the warm African sun, camping, scantily-clad, near what is now Monte Carlo, building their huts out of bones and skin; and thinking--"gee, I would really love to freeze my ass. I think I'll keep pushing north". It does not add up.
--Renaissance
Saturday, January 17, 2009
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