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Metadata
| Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Doug |
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Why
I passed on that link, Ben, because it disturbed me. It didn't occasion anger, but rather the question: "good heavens, what brings a person to such a pass." It seems to have struck you similarly.
Are the sentiments expressed here not similar to the charicature of Christianity attacked by Machiavelli, the passivism that "gives the world over as prey to the wicked"? While this terribly mistaken belief does persist among certain Quakers, certain meditative sects, here we find the same position unredeemed by religion, subsisting instead on new-agey gestures: feelings, peace, an ethics mixed of milk and treacle. As I said, the most appalling thing. It horrified me, and I suppose I linked seeking comfort in numbers. We know what to expct from that.
In recompense, let me point you here.
[Ben A.: 5/27/04 13:08] |
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Are You Testing Me?
Ben, how could you link to that knowing that I'd have to read it? I am making a genuine effort to change my attitude, which necessarily includes a period of avoidance of provocative stimuli. It goes without saying that I share your assessment. What am I supposed to do with this? Maybe I should consider it some sort of deeply ironic gesture, a critique of the view it overstates. Of course, I know that's false. This deeply deluded man, confronted with a boastful photographic testament to the barbarity of his son's murderers, gives them the forgiveness and grants them a spark of conscience he in turn denies to George Bush, and means it without irony, means it with absolute lunatic sincerity. This is the voice of a society that has not merely lost confidence in itself, but abjures it very right to live on. It is not the voice of mere slave morality, but of suicide morality.
What the hell is the Boston Globe doing running this piece? Do its editors think it is a brave gesture, a subversive gesture, praiseworthy dissent? It is nothing more than amplifying a father's horrifying desecration of his son's memory. A man selling the life of the flesh of his flesh for a political campaign. I get the sickening sense that for this man, the death of his son is less an occasion for grief (of course, desire for vengeance is out of the question), than an opportunity to preen self-righteously before the camera and luxuriate in the adulation of the antiwar left.
But I'm not angry. This is not a matter for spleen, but for tears. It is depressing how low people can sink.
[Ben H.: 5/26/04 21:39] |
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Various
If serenity demands ingratitude towards such gifts of providence as the great Saatchi insurance fire of aught-four, then all this meditative stuff can go hang! I am so looking forward to learning what bogus works were immolated.
Also, Ben H., don't beat yourself up over the call on Wells-for-Clemens (although I recall you defending the virtues of Homer Bush). It's closer than you would imagine: Wells is the best morbidly obese athelete of the decade:
Wells (record, innings, Ks, ERA)
1999 17-10, 231.2, 169, 4.82
2000 20-8, 229.2, 166, 4.12
2001 5-7, 100.2, 59, 4.47
2002 19-7, 206.1, 137, 3.75
2003 15-7, 213.0, 101, 4.14
Clemens (record, innings, Ks, ERA)
1999 14-10, 187.2, 163, 4.60
2000 13-8, 204.1, 188, 3.70
2001 20-3, 220.1, 213, 3.51
2002 13-6, 180.0, 192, 4.35
2003 17-9, 211.2, 190, 3.91
[Ben A.: 5/26/04 18:05] |
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Menu Poker Next To Real Poker
The last intense menu poker session I had with my high school friends took place at one of their bachelor parties. This took place at one of those Indian casinos (Mohegan Sun maybe? I can't recall exactly). They boast about the array of restaurants they have just off the floor and as against my preconceptions about Vegas buffets, these Indians had brought in some pricey eateries. Now, I loath casinos. I find it particularly dull since one could argue that I spend my whole workday gambling anyway, except with much larger sums of (other people's) money, in an infinitely more interesting casino, one where I have an edge and where I don't have to breathe stale tobacco smoke. So we have this enormous meal, and many, many drinks are consumed, and I think to myself, Ben, the bill is going to come and it is going to be this stupid thing where I have to either get stuck with paying for all these other guys*' alcohol or I am going to have to be a stick in the mud and point out that I didn't have any. The whole process is going to cause a lot of brain damage and I am going to feel bad (either mad-bad or guilty-bad) either way. And I've suffered through a three hour drive up here and I am facing a three hour drive back and I've stood around in this retarded casino for several hours, I mean I've had pretty intense disutility already. So I am just going to grab the damn check and pay for the whole thing myself. That way I don't feel mad, like I've been gypped, or bad, like I've been a killjoy miser, but instead I'll feel generous. And whatever this is going to cost, it is trivial in comparison to what I would have paid to avoid the whole experience in the first place. Worked like a charm!
*none of whom had an MBA at the time.
[Ben H.: 5/25/04 21:51] |
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Menu Poker Strategies
How I hate being inveigled into spending a zillion dollars at dinner! It can be even worse among groups of friends, like mine, where some have chosen to follow God, not Mammon (or in the case of physicians, have deferred their allegiance to the Horned King until after residency).
My response depends upon the group. When a true innocent, like, say, a teacher, is dragged down the spiral of $10 martinis, I start fussing about my desire to split the bill by what we ordered. When it's just us clock-work zombies,* however, I follow Ben H's "bad man" theory and order the most expensive steak on the menu. The one I had at this bachelor party in SF was fantastic.
*Naturally, I consider myself "in, but not of" the b-school influenced robot world. But don't they all?
Risk Pooling...
...Is just what happens when you're stuck splitting the tab with a group of Ketel-One-Cosmopolitan-chugging I-bankers. What, you say your "risk" of buying a $15 drink is zero? Too bad! And with health care, you can't even refuse the invitation.
Something for Nothing
Just thought you might be interested to know, Ben H, that Brandon Claussen has stuck out 26% of all batters he's faced in AAA. No word on his jump shot.
Karate Champ
My synagogue was unusual in that after the Torah portion, there would be a period of discussion. It was a faculty crowd, and so the discussion was often quite erudite; as you might also expect, it was frequently insufferable. (note: both insufferable and erudite correlate with "Harvard faculty member," but did not, correlate with each other. This was not the last time I would observe this). Anyway, the point being, that my Dad, a reasonable guy, would let me skip the discussion period and encouraged me to play videogames across the street instead.
That's the (perhaps unique) context I bring to Karate Champ (also, to Kung Fu Master). It's a great game! At our next get together, I propose we download it in MAME and play it extensively to the exclusion of all other passtimes. [I should also note that despite a high level of skill, I could never win the very first extra cerdit "challenge" screen. Doug, did you ever successfully dodge the flowerpots?]
[Ben A.: 5/25/04 17:06] |
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Menu Poker
Doug, your analogy is perfect!
I've had similar discomfort with the other side of the menu. When I first moved back to New York, I went out more frequently with my high school friends. These guys and gals are capable of guzzling copious amounts of alcohol. As you know, I abstain. When the bill used to come around, though, simplicity argued for just slicing it up evenly. Not wanting to sound like a whiner or a miser, I would end up holding my tongue and emptying my wallet. At a certain point, I realized that dining out with these friends embodied a classic collective action problem, moral hazard. The rational response would be to consume as much alcohol as possible on these occasions, a response that my own preferences foreclosed to me. Then I realized: I may be a teetotaler, but I am also at times a relentless over-eater. I would fast the day of these outings and consume as large and extravagant an array of dishes as possible.
Now, Doug, I don't deny that a bunch of status-consumed yuppies bantering about "how reasonable" an enormous bill is, all the while clutching their billfolds with white knuckles, probably do not make for pleasant company. I would suggest, however, that it is likewise no fun to listen to a bunch of half-cocked twenty-somethings express shock over the per-head amount that's due after a night of frenzied guzzling of cosmopolitans.
[Ben H.: 5/25/04 15:03] |
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Stepmother Tongue
I had an exchange of Bloombergs with a friend this afternoon during which an interesting question came up regarding when to Americanize (why i do not say "anglicize" will become clear shortly) the pronunciation of foreign words. We were discussing London hotels; she mentioned that she had stayed at the Berkeley, but noted that people seemed to pronounce it "Barkley." I replied that in fact it (and the square it is on) is pronounced "Barkley." Well, she, quite sensibly in my view, dislikes pretentious use of foreign pronunciation in conversation. Shouldn't she, therefore, as an American English speaker pronounce it "Berkley?"
A good question. We agreed that very few verbal tics annoy quite as acutely as New Yorkers who talk about their Spanish holidays in "IbiTHa." I recall with irritation the way that Peter Jennings used to say "Nicaragua" back during Iran-Contra (I know Doug shares this sentiment). He would momentarily drop out of his smug pucker-face Canadian accent and spit out the name of the country with an absurd hispanophone elan; that raised "i" ("ee") hurt, but that "r", that precious, self-satisfied dentalized liquid, that one little phoneme, so harmless to a more tolerant soul, probably did more than any other one thing to bring me over to the side of the Contras, Reagan and conservatism generally. So we can say, I think, that I share my correspondent's abhorrence of affected refusal to Americanize foreign names and words.
And yet... I could not agree that one should pronounce the square or the hotel "Berklee." It just didn't seem right to me. I have given it some thought, and I think my answer helps move towards a codifiable rule on Americanization. "Berkeley" is really just a weirdly spelled word; like "through" or "Leicester." It is not said as it is spelled. Now, it would be precious for an American to pronounce "Berkeley" as "Bahcleh" (as "U" Brits do), or to pronounce "Leicester" as "Lihstah." The trick is first to translate the funny spelling to a representative spelling -- that is, a spelling that represents how locals pronounce it (to continue with our examples: "Barkley" and "Lester"). Take that spelling at read it with a pure, clean American accent: the former should sound like the last name of the basketball player otherwise known as "Sir Charles", the latter like the first name of the notorious Gov Maddox of Georgia.
Guys, do you think this rule works?
I realize, of course, that it does nothing to resolve the related perplexities involving whether to use local or translated placenames. Torino for Turin? Abomination! But wouldn't you say that substituting Leghorn for Livorno is also kind of stupid?
[Ben H.: 5/24/04 21:12] |
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Insure This!
Doug, you are right on about the folly of modern health insurance. Neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Blue Cross invented risk collectivization. As I alluded to in an earlier post on old age pensions, people erroneously identify risk-pooling with the institutions that carry it out today. Of course, risk-pooling pre-dates these particular institutions. People didn't merely drop dead or fend for themselves when they became ill before the advent of the HMO. When one family member got sick, others took care of him; or neighbors took care of neighbors. As medical care became not merely comfort that pretty much anybody could provide, but rather a specialized skill, it was woven into the cash nexus. That move called for a more formal risk-pooling arrangement, namely health insurance.
People often lose sight of the fact that saving can function as a form of risk-pooling. I defer consumption in exchange for a claim on others' future production. Should I fall ill (or grow old -- as in the example from the earlier post), I can draw down this claim to meet my needs. The advantage over normal health insurance or PAYG pension schemes -- I'll call these intratemporal risk-pooling -- is that it is manifestly within the control of the individual to manage. The individual owns the resources he uses to insulate himself from the consequences of unforeseen events and therefore can dispose of them as he pleases. Intratemporal schemes require a complicated web of rules to prevent adverse selection, moral hazard, and outright fraud.
It is also possible to combine intertemporal and intratemporal schemes. In the case of health care, this would involve medical savings accounts supplemented by intratemporal risk-pooling for truly catastrophic expenses. Sure, you still have the bureaucratic challenges of intratemporal schemes, but the smaller the corner you push the intratemporal aspect of risk-pooling into, the less vexing those challenges become. Our health care system runs in the other direction. We put routine, utterly predictable expenses through the insurance scheme by mandate. New York State requires health plans to cover contraceptives. You might as well make an insurance claim for toothpaste! I thought this represented the height of insurance absurdity until I saw that most plans also cover Viagra: that's like having insurance pay for candy and toothpaste!
[Ben H.: 5/24/04 20:49] |
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As you've gathered and/or been explicitly told, excessive work has kept me from posting. It's my fault. I budgeted too little time for this project. I really have to concede that I can't work as fast with voice recognition software as I could when my wrists were healthy and I could type a lot.
Ben H's point about the insurance industry is well taken. Only the blessed get paid to do what they really want to do. Ben H may be so blessed -- I'll let him decide -- but Ben A and I are not. Nobody is going to pay me to take strolls and write unpublishable philosophy books*. The goal is to find something that pays well without much impairing your ability to do what you like to do. In particular, you don't want to overtax whatever faculty your preferred activity relies on. Amateur cyclists should probably not take jobs as bike messengers. And I should probably not have a job that requires so much abstract thinking. If I were healthier and it paid more, I'd go break rocks at the quarry Howard Roark-style. I guess the insurance industry would be a decent alternative to this, not too mentally taxing. I never did insurance work, but I had some enjoyable temp jobs. The only time I ever felt I really understood Goedel's second incompleteness theorem was when I was collating financial reports for the Trust Company of the West in L.A. The paper-piling was so mindless that I could focus totally on the math.
My only problem is when artists let their insurance work go too far, like Boulez and Stockhausen, who derive their music directly from actuarial tables.
Seriously, my only problem is that there is an insurance industry. This is quickly becoming my own hobby-horse. Mutual health insurance is basically a bunch of people who get together and say "if I get sick, you'll pay my doctor bills, and if you get sick, I'll pay yours." It is not immediately clear that this requires an industry. I guess it's clear, after a few seconds' thought, that an industry can help optimize these arrangements -- widen membership beyond personal acquaintances to dilute the pain of big claims, standardize claim-approval procedures, generally act as a broker. But the industry has grown so far beyond this as to have become the agent-principal problem from hell. By getting its tentacles into the medical system itself, it has made itself indispensable: you can't go back to the old informal-agreement model, because doctors won't even treat you without a plastic insurance-industry card. And our country's laws, paid for by lobbyists, enforce this system. I don't particularly want to go into the details of the Health Care Question, but I want to ask whether I'm wrong to think that we should all stand back and be dumbfounded by the very idea that there is a health insurance "industry" which straight-facedly defends its own "interests". (You could counter that this question would apply just as well to, say, the securities industry. To which I say (1) corporate financing requires larger and more complicated transactions than health insurance, and (2) the securities industry does make unethical profits from its own conflicts of interest.)
Frankly, my attitude toward the Health Care System is the same as the Bush administration's attitude toward Iraq: it's in such despicable hands that, even without a clear plan for the aftermath, we should just smash it to bits and see what happens.
What else. Oh yeah, we did go to Michigan for a long weekend. We saw my parents, and hung out with John G. and Tomoko for the first time since our wedding. We actually went camping at the same place near Charlevoix where our "contra" mythos was founded. Speaking of baroque nerd games (as Ben A just was), we watched a videotape of an old "gin" tournament (pronounced with a hard "g"). When our parents took us camping and it rained, we would go to various roadhouses, where they'd drink beer and we would play whatever games were available: pool, Pac-Man, etc. One bar had a game called "Karate Champ" with low resolution graphics and even lower-resolution voice synthesis. Before every match, a pixellated referee would say "Begin!", except that the first syllable was inaudible. Somehow the remaining syllable, along with the Karate Champ's seven point scoring system and some other idiosyncrasies, got woven into this other (physical) game we played that involved throwing a ball off the roof. Gin evolved into a sophisticated game and we took winning very seriously. (I think we finally lost count of the G. family's lightbulbs/windowpanes that succumbed to our efforts.)
This reminds me of an even nerdier game, a card game that I actually named "contra". I don't remember all the rules. I invented it with my friend Jason in 10th or 11th grade. Partly it was a math-geek phenomenon (the basic idea was to lay out cards domino-style so that all rows added up to prime numbers), but it was also a pretty funny parody/celebration of card game nomenclature. Have you ever considered all the weird words associated with card games? Take just cribbage: the crib? his heels? his nob? What exactly is his nob? Why would you want it? Anyway, in contra, the hand you're dealt is called the "wad", and your goal is to "blow your wad" by playing all your cards on the aforementioned grid. There is also a card kept face-down on the table called the "smeg", although I can't remember what its function was. Also, we had some mildly pornographic term for sticking a card in the hole between four other cards; alas, it escapes me.
Warning to people in their mid-to-late-20's
Had dinner last week with a friend at Otto, Mario Batali's new pizza joint on Eighth Street. It's fine, a little too clean and bright and food-networky for my downtown sensibilities; I suppose, given that authentic is the new good, it was good. Anyway she was complaining about another trendy restaurant she'd dined in, with her friend's circle of business-school buddies. TO ALL WHO HAVE EARS TO HEAR, REJECT SUCH INVITATIONS AT ALL COST. I don't want to say that all recent business school graduates are lepers; I don't even believe that, quite. On their own, some are decent conversationalists (they read The Economist, after all!) and some can be more than money-driven automata. But put four or five of them around a table of foccaccia and San Pellegrino and watch out. You instantly have a competition to determine who can blow the most money and be the most ostentatiously blasé about it. We once got invited to a Tribeca conspicuous-consumption parlor (Layla, if you care to know) by one of Dao's friends, who is a sweet and intelligent person. The dinner was organized by her business school buddies. The menu perusal phase was like gastronomical poker. "I'll see your scuba-dived scallops and raise you a Chateau Latour." The thing is that nobody can fold -- to do so would be to declare one's (current or projected) salary lower than the others', and to these people, nothing more shameful is imaginable. Once the a la carte options had been maxed out, somebody raised the idea of the tasting menu. Well, the waiter informed us, the whole table has to order the tasting menu. I figured this was out of the question since several plates of appetizers had already been consumed. But in this poker game nobody could point this out, lest they be suspected of flinching at the $60-a-head price. As an ancillary guest, I didn't feel like spoiling everyone's fun. (I hadn't yet realized that there was no fun, only posturing.) So once the idea was raised, nobody could oppose it, despite its patent absurdity. My steak came and, already full from the mezze, I put it straight into the doggie bag, untouched. I didn't actually wish death on any of my convives until the bill came and they started commenting on it: "How reasonable!" "Not even a hundred dollars a person!" "Great bargain!"
As I said to our friend at Otto: you shouldn't despise these people, because they are the boiler that keeps the engine of prosperity going ... but that doesn't make the boiler room an agreeable place to hang out.
Saturday we had the chance to see our friend Henry whom we met in Hanoi. He was passing through New York ... and meeting at a restaurant with his business school buddies. Henry is actually such a great guy that I had no second thoughts about it. Of course, we didn't stay past an initial round of drinks. And we said not more than fifty words total to the five other people there. Actually they didn't seem so bad, but in this situation I have learned not to take chances.
* unless, of course, I use that philosophy to launch a new career as a guru.
[Doug: 5/24/04 18:44] |
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Romani Ite Domum
In response to the question, "what's your favorite movie," I've long answered Life of Brian. Since I haven't watched it since the days of the first Bush administration, I wondered whether that assessment might have gone stale. Luckily, I got the chance to find out. As a sort of opportunistic and cheeky response to the success of The Passion of the Christ, the Pythons have arranged for a theatrical re-release of their classic biblical satire. I saw it at the Sunshine yesterday, and I am happy to report that I found it, if anything, funnier now than I did as a callow youth. For one thing, the film is greatly enhanced by the movie-theater experience -- a large, raucous, appreciative audience; and a wide screen and good sound system, not at all for the usual reasons (to better appreciate a special effects extravaganza) but to offset the poor sound and film quality that made many bits of the film inscrutable on 80s-era VCRs.
The ending remains one of the all-time great closing numbers. A fun fact: during the Falklands War, the crew of the HMS Sheffield, sinking after taking a hit from an Argentine Exocet missile, broke into their own rendition of "Always Look On the Bright Side of Life" as they awaited rescue.
*Indulgent digression: the sinking of the Sheffield came as a great surprise, for a very similar reason to that which led planners to wrongly believe that the WTC could withstand the immpact of a large passenger aircraft. Many of the Sheffield's structural elements were made, unusually, of aluminum. The ships architechts, however, did not take account of the intense heat that could arise from burning excess missile propellant in the event the ship should be hit by a missile. Aluminum can actually burn at such temperatures, which is exactly what happened when the Sheffield was hit by the Exocet. The ship withstood the impact and warhead explosion tolerably well, but had to be abandoned due to the fire and attendant toxic gases. The story is told in this fun, little book.
[Ben H.: 5/24/04 15:06] |
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Early Fruits
It’s harder to avoid the news than I imagined. Deb wakes up to NPR in the morning. Fortunately (for me), medical hours are so ungodly early that grogginess shields me from direct exposure, but I vaguely recall some infuriating bit about abortion.
Even the drive into work revealed every radio station as a potential threat to equanimity. After the sports radio station (I mean really!) paused to discuss the Saudi proposal to raise oil production, I scrambled in my backseat for a suitable CD. What I found: Araby. Timeless achievements:1. Soul-sucking emphemera: 0.
“We had the better team, but their Russians were better than our Russians”
The Boston suburb of Brookline boasts one of the best public school systems in the country. Students from the high school routinely matriculate at Ivies and top technical schools, and property values reflect this. So what does it mean when my Russian cab driver talks about supplementing his son’s Brookline education with a math tutor? It means, simply, that American math instruction blows.
Abundant evidence suggests the superiority of lesson plans East of the Elbe. Personal anecdotage confirms this. The title quote above was my sophomore block-mate David’s explanation of a youthful loss in the math Olympiad. (I've always enjoyed the implication that Russians are to high school math what goaltending is to hockey -- when your Russians are on a hot streak, it's a tremendous equalizer...)
Dilating on math-related topics … I don’t doubt exposure to a Russian curriculum would have substantially improved me, but of course, let’s not kid ourselves. The most value of a selective college comes in the first three months, with the inevitable explosion of high-school illusions.
David, though the nicest fellow imaginable, certainly helped me with this. He was the scion of a highly accomplished scientific family (his grandfather provided the name of your UCSD college, Doug), and like many of us, spent his early youth making up intricate strategy games. Unlike the rest of us, however, he was able to road test these entertainments with Von Neumann at the family Christmas party. True story:
Young David: “would you like to play my new game”
Von Neumann: “(microsecond pause) Only if I go second.”
I’m drifting here… okay … anyway, with guys like David around you quickly abandon dreams of mathematical immortality. As, alas, do guys like David. I believe his hyper-selective math class adopted as their motto “When Gauss was your age…”
To the Victor
A steaming pitcher of ichor for you, Ben H, when next we meet!
[Ben A.: 5/24/04 12:16] |
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Dinner Time, Sucka
Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls"!
"Blimey, Jeeves! That's a bloody big pile of bones, I'd say! Whoever made this mess must have been a rather bad egg!"
Media Blackout
Weird, Ben, I had the same thought. As you know, I haven't had a television for nearly a decade, so that's taken care of. Since I moved, I haven't had a radio either (I've been too lazy to hook it up; and frankly, I feel like long stretches of silence have done my mental state good). Alas, my job requires me to stay on top of the news. However, I have made an effort to avoid domestic papers. I have been unpacking my books, now that the workmen have finished up, and I came across my copy of Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man. I know Mann basically renounced it later in life, but at the moment I find that idea that passionate involvement in politics precludes many noble virtues, first among them creativity, quite convincing.
UPDATE: Apparently, others share my revulsion at how the political has pervaded all discourse to the exclusion of loftier concerns.
Daniel Schorr
Isn't that wheezing gasbag dead yet? (Sorry, you can probably count that as a splenetic outburst; yet there is a difference between serenity and a vegetative state. To fail to lash out in response to Daniel Schorr's voice probably counts as one of the standards for deciding whether one is awake or in a coma.)
[Ben H.: 5/23/04 20:31] |
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Angrying Up The Blood
Bravo, Ben H, for avoiding the Sontag. A foetid whiff of NPR (Daniel Schorr!) spiked my bloodpressure this morning. The first portentous line had me exploding: "oh shut up, you defeatist motherfucker!" While coming down, I wondered (not for the first time) why I have not attempted complete media sessation. I didn't have a answer, so I hereby inaugurate a pilot (uncontrolled) study: one week with no newspapers, no webnews, no nothing except spectator sports, books, tennis, and current-event excluding conversations. I will, however, chart my progress here.
Already, by avoiding the news this weekend, I have found time for timeless achievements like the following:
"You will observe, sir, that the hewn walls of the passage, according to the direction of the strokes, must have been chiseled from beneath."
"From beneath you say, Jeeves?"
"Yes, sir."
"But in that case --"
"For the sake of your sanity, sir, I would advise you not to ruminate on the implications."
A dinner at the Junior Ganymede to the first to cite the ur-text...
[Ben A.: 5/23/04 18:59] |
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Serenity
I noticed that the NYT Magazine cover story is a Susan Sontag essay on Abu Ghraib, probably something along the lines of how the pictures prove that the U.S. is the world's worst torturer, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, etc. But not only have I refrained from giving it a vigorous fisking, I didn't even read it.
Over on Smith Street, billionaire-sponsored grass-roots activists MoveOn.org are holding a "George Bush retirement party," featuring a bevy of leftists poets ($5 suggested donation, a bargain at twice the price, I'm sure). Much as provoking street demonstrators has given me transient delight in the past (a fond memory: walking beside the cops at a Mumia/Leonard Peltier demo in Murray Hill yelling, "Leonard Peltier is a Red Injun cop-killer!"), I stayed on my side of Court Street.
[Ben H.: 5/23/04 16:19] |
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The Creative Ferment of the Insurance Industry
I did my best this weekend to take advantage of New York's cultural opportunities, given that I've already suffered the financial and emotional damage of living here. So off I went to Saturday's installment of the New York Philharmonic's Charles Ives festival. The program promised an interesting evening (Ives, Gershwin, premier of an Adams piece), but as is too often the case at Avery Fisher Hall, uneven execution marred a good concept. John Adams took the podium as guest conductor; as part of my effort at self-improvement, I'll limit myself to saying that John Adams is a good composer. I had a bit of advance warning of Adams' difficulties: one of Bernie's friends attended an open rehearsal and reported that Adams was having trouble making some of the Ives work. When I saw that one Ives piece (Fugue: "From Greenland's Icy Mountains") had been dropped from the program at the last minute, I had a sinking feeling. It turned out only to be partially justified. The soprano Audra McDonald did a fantastic job, showing immense versatility, shining equally at Gershwin quasi-ragtime and an Adams operatic excerpt. While admiring her performance, I did not find this last piece to my taste. Adams' opera Nixon in China is a pretty cool piece of minimalism (check out track 4 here for a sense of it), but this new one seems firmly of his post-minimalist "aimless noodling" phase. Worse yet, the opera is entitled "Doctor Atomic", which one would vainly hope to be the first Marvel Comics opera, but instead is about J. Robert Oppenheimer; Saint J. Robert Fucking Oppenheimer, poor persecuted victim of the mean anti-Communists. Puh-leeze! Only Adams' Harmonium turned out a total disaster. I really like this piece (I even have a recording of it, you can hear excerpts here), but this rendition was ruined by the caterwauling Choral Arts Society of Washington, which spent most of the 35 minute duration of the piece searching unsuccessfully for accurate pitch. I mean, even I could tell; which means that Bernie, with her expensively trained musician's ear, spent the 35 minutes alternately squirming and grimacing.
I'm fond of Ives, and I am always grateful for the opportunity to hear his work performed in concert. It isn't, after all, the sort of stuff that one puts on the stereo after work or as background sound for a lazy Sunday afternoon. Part of the attraction, I think, comes from Ives the man. Ben A. posted a note about Wallace Stevens recently. Ives represents the musical parallel to Stevens. He gives the lie entirely to the Romantic notions of the wild, unruly, passionate life that a gifted composer must lead. Ives spent his entire working life as an insurance executive. In fact, his reputation in that field* is one of an important innovator. His life gives those of us in vulgar trade the hope that it will not entirely foreclose the possibility of artistic transcendence. Ives would commute home from his office and spend the evenings composing. Few of his works were performed until the very end of his life. Perhaps residing on the artistic fringe allowed him the freedom to write such unusual, unprecedented music.
Pairing Ives and Adams makes for a revealing contrast. Adams enjoyed rather precocious success and has spent his career cosseted by the artistic establishment. Very quickly after graduation from Harvard, he landed as the composer-in-residence of the San Francisco Symphony and soono after inked a recording contract that has meant that virtually every piece of music he has completed has been recorded and released. His work glows with high polish, but I doubt it will ever achieve the startling originality of Ives'.
*Stevens also worked in insurance. And not that I consider him an artist in the same sense as Ives and Stevens, but when Tom Clancy wrote The Hunt for Red October he was working as an insurance broker in Maryland. What is it with this business? Perhaps insurance is dull and slow enough to allow ample scope for daydreaming?
[Ben H.: 5/23/04 10:10] |
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Genre Confusion on Lafayette Avenue
Brooklyn Academy of Music is running a Wong Kar Wai retrospective this month. Bernie is a big fan; I’m only familiar with his more recent films, In the Mood for Love and Happy Together, both of which come from the “longing, loss, memory” school of “luminous” storytelling. And while I recall now that he has done a few movies that veer into "action" territoy, this evening I expected a movie in a similar vein to the two just mentioned. We were supposed to see As Tears Go By, which, judging only by the title*, would not deviate from this formula. Due to the life-eating properties of my job, I did not arrive in Brooklyn in time for this movie. Instead we took in the other Wong Kar Wai film on offer, the puzzlingly titled Haunted Cop Shop (all his titles are translated, and to be honest, I thought we had a “Donkey Kong” situation here). How to describe this film? If Slapstick Vampire Policier were a recognized genre, the ur-text of Slapstick Vampire Policiers would be Haunted Cop Shop. I think having written the foregoing, I give nothing away by telling you that Haunted Cop Shop is a very, very silly movie. To judge by the standards of viewer response, Haunted Cop Shop was great. I laughed my ass off, even, or maybe especially, in those all-too-frequent parts during which the subtitles failed to appear, probably out of a misplaced desire on the part of the translators to protect the reputation of the writers.
Do you guys remember the part of the Anita Hill hearings where Senator Specter (I think) noted portentiously certain parallels between Prof. Hill’s testimony and The Exorcist? If any of Secretary Rumsfeld’s senatorial inquisitors had seen Haunted Cop Shop, they surely would have asked the same sort of question about this movie and Abu Ghraib, since a key part of the slender plot hangs on the main characters walking about with their heads covered by women’s underwear.
One of you two, in an earlier post, pointed out how you perceive movies very differently when you enter the theatre without any foreknowledge or informed expectations. A similar effect obtains when one has wildly incorrect expectations. My theatergoing experience was kind of like buying a ticket for a Douglas Sirk movie and having the projectionist put on one of those Lloyd Kauffman / Troma flicks. My goofball shields were completely down; Haunted Cop Shop de-cloaked and fried me with dork phasers.
My enjoyment was probably also conditioned by the knowledge of what I was avoiding by agreeing to go to this show. Bernie had been after me to accompany her to the new Jim Jarmusch movie, Coffee And Cigarettes, and we went to BAM in preference to that. It is foreordained that I should despise a movie by an overrated, pretentious director named for two substances I find disgusting.** With every constipation joke and pratfall of Haunted Cop Shop, I got an additional thrill of knowing at that very moment patrons of the Angelika were being abused by the dull virtual humor of Jarmusch’s B-list celebrity improvisers.
*I maintain in the face of dogged conventional and aphoristic wisdom that this is in fact a highly efficient means of judging movies, books, and people.
**As you two know, I’ve been particularly vocal on the former, as long ago as over 10 years ago (see here; a slighter and more recent example from this blog here). However, the definitive anti-coffee case appears in Mark Helprin’s Memoir from Antproof Case, whose nameless narrator attacks his sentencing judge and divorces his first wife over drinking coffee. Incidentally, he also makes his fortune as an emerging markets investor. Coincidence?
[Ben H.: 5/22/04 00:26] |
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No Breast-Feeding on the 2-Train, But...
...that doesn't mean the Broadway lines are oddity free. I spied the fellow next to me as I rode home last night reading a book entitled "Truth In Dating" (here is the book in question, in all its pathetic glory, thanks to Amazon). Nothing particularly exceptional about that (though I own there is something kind of sad about dating instruction books), except that the reader was a forty-something Hasid. Wouldn't he be better served by "Truth In Arranged Marriages?"
But let's assume that for twenty years he's escaped the clutches of the matchmaker, or, alternatively, that his maturing child-bride's charms have faded, what with the ban on schmattes made from Indian hair forcing her to don some kind of polyester wig and her 12 grueling trips through childbirth before age 35, and as a result, Mr. Hasid has decided to commit himself to the New York dating scene. I'm going to wager that whatever frustrations he has encountered, they probably cannot be chalked up to issues of honesty. I mean, what, did he lose the attentions of waves of Manhattans young lovelies through insufficiently credible excuses used to turn down Friday-night dates? Or, what, me, Hasidic? Oh, the beard, how funny, actually it's just that I forgot to trim my Van Dyke for a couple of days.
But who am I, my feelings hidden under a carapace of mendacious conventionality, to scoff at another man's decision to strip away all the protective deceptions and get out there and bare his soul. Brave Hasid, let the ladies know what you're all about: Bubbeleh, you may be a piece of trayf, but you fiiiiiiiine!
[Ben H.: 5/21/04 07:25] |
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Soylent: It's People! (tm)
I like your suggestion, Ben. The company motto practically wrote itself. You do injure me, though, when you say that "Demeter" is smart-ass; that was the honest suggestion I made to the rest of the board! My only other one was Southern Cone Agricultural Management; SCAM acronmyically-speaking. I was admonished that in the age of Sarbanes-Oxley and Elliot Spitzer, it is unwise to make such a suggestion, even in jest.
When it comes to acronym-based names, though, we will have difficulty coming to agreement. The board is partly Argentine and partly American. The anglophone and hispanophone world do acronmyms very differently. For us ice-people, an acronmy is a series of letters, each pronounced by name. International Business Machines = IBM = "Aye-Bee-Emm." The hot-blooded Latins aim for more euphony in their acronyms, taking pieces of the underlying words and stitching them into pronounceable names. Aerovias Nacionales de Colombia, SA = AVIANCA (pronouced as it looks). Inversiones y Representaciones, SA = Irsa. Some are slightly hybrid: Compania Nacional Telefonica de Venezuela = CANTV = "Can-tay-vay." Another difference you may have deduced from these examples is that the corporate status designator gets folded into the hispanophone acronym (generally) while it stays out of the anglophone one (generally). That is, "inc." or "corp" or "ltd." do not become "i" or "c" or "l" in the acronym; they are left out. "Sociedad Anonima" practically always gets tacked on as "sa": Endesa, Enarsa, Tribasa, Ahmsa, Hylsa, etc.
[Ben H.: 5/20/04 10:33] |
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Company Names
For an agrobusiness concern based in the Catholic South, can I suggest Soylent?
Seriously, though, my ill-named company considered a change two years ago, and identified a few basic categories.
1. Do you want to be listed on Nasdaq, or at least give the strong implication of a 90s scam-IPO covered by Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jenrette? If so, select for overall level of tweeness and the presence of Xs, Zs, (and, perhaps, Qs). Possibilities then include barbarisms like "Agrotex" and smart-ass names like "Ceres" or "Demeter".
2. Do you instead want to appear a corporate behemoth? If so, acronymns -- ADM, EDC, MPM -- avoid pigeonholing, convey immensity, and give lots of leeway. The risk here is that, like Vince McMahon, you'll be aced out on the letter code by some non-governmental. TFP (Tenencias Feudales De la Plantación) is likely free.
3. I favor the Honda "Accord" route, whereby the company just coopts some familiar, euphonous noun. Biotech has done this well, with Millenium, Vertex, and more recently, Infinity and Memory. For your company, let me suggest "Verdant".
[Ben A.: 5/20/04 01:20] |
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Metropolitan Diary Goes Mammary
Probably wouldn't pass muster with Joe Rogers, but what the heck...
Dear Diary,
One muggy evening recently, I boarded the 4 train for my nightly trek back to Brooklyn. I counted myself lucky to secure a place to sit. I got settled and looked up: directly across from me a woman was breastfeeding her child. Now, Diary, I know that at this point in the twee story, someone on the train makes a witty comment worthy of recording, or the train breaks into applause, or a "nattily dressed elderly gentleman" or "woman of a certain age" does something funny. But, I am sorry to report, nothing of the sort happened. I just gawped at the discomfiting spectacle of this woman breastfeeding her child. On the 4 train. Right in front of my face. And I thought to myself, you know, this really feels like a Metropolitan Diary entry, but at the crucial point its taken an awful wrong turn, and no nattily dressed elderly gentleman or woman of a certain age is going to rescue me from this looming, distended breast and hideous slurping. But then I remembered, Diary, that Joe Rogers and before him the wry Enid Nemy often admitted items without nattily dressed elderly gentlemen or women of a certain age if they consisted of doggerel. So to distract myself, I composed the following:
A woman I saw on the train
Giving suck to her child, it was plain
Than see infantile tipple
Dispensed from a nipple
I'd rather walk home in the rain.
[Ben H.: 5/19/04 22:02] |
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My White Collar Blushes
I spent Wednesday afternoon waiting at home for tradesmen to visit and make some repairs. Before the sure-handed technical competence of the blue collar thaumaturges I rely on to make my toilets flush, boiler run and such, I feel a little sheepish. I don’t think I squirm out of a typical metropolitan leftist discomfort with people “serving” one. Anyway, the relationship between a plumber and the proud owner of a non-functional toilet does not conform to the supposedly discomfiting master-and-servant dynamic. Try to get a plumber on short notice; he’s nobody’s vassal. No, what’s gets to me is an emasculating sense of incompetence; to be confronted with one’s own helpless idiocy, if only with respect to a very small corner of human experience. But it is not unimportant what corner the ineptitude pertains to: the manipulation of basic physical objects and systems. Self-respect is intimately connected with mastery: mastery of skills, mastery over one’s environment. Sure, I may have achieved a certain degree of mastery over the manipulation of symbols (to borrowing a rare useful Reichianism), but that sort of mastery seems like a mere echo, analogy, of the sort of physical mastery that a plumber exhibits. In the face of this sort of competence, my abstract skills seem feeble and factitious.
Witness: the plumber was coming to take a look at a sink from which no water would flow. I kept trying to open and close the faucets, I rooted around the valves beneath the basin, all pretty much randomly and desultorily. No luck. The plumber shows up, takes one look at it, grabs the nozzle, hardly even looking at it, twists it, and off pops a little doodad. He turns on the tap and a gusher pours forth. An old, dirt-clogged aerator was the culprit (I give the precise diagnosis here, but I couldn’t have told you what an aerator was five minutes earlier). In two seconds, any sense of pride, Master-of-the-Universe self-regard, power evaporated utterly; in its place a palpable feeling of being a mental and physical midget. This plumber was nice enough not to laugh at me.
I’ve had more than my usual share of this sensation since I bought a house. My coping strategy has been to confront the unpleasant chastening head-on, and hang about the working tradesmen asking lots of questions. Despite my poor mechanical skills, by dint of memorization I can manage to learn a decent amount about domestic systems. Reactions have varied sharply: from barely concealed eye-rolling that all but cries out, “why don’t you just leave me to do my work, you yuppie puke, you’re getting in the way”; to slightly defensive reticence, as though the guy feels his ability to command wages for his labor depends on preserving his techniques as a kind of Eleusinian Mystery; to the response I hope for, a gratified surprise that a clearly incompetent customer would care enough to want to learn about this stuff and an eagerness to show his mastery of stuff he clearly still gets excited about. I got a great lecture about the different kind of duct systems in use, advantages and disadvantages of alternative insulation materials, workings of vent cleaning machines. Hoping that guy can recommend a different A/C servicer. Mine seems to have learned his communication style from the Soviet Ministry of HVAC…
[Ben H.: 5/19/04 21:50] |
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Let Me Siphon Your Creative Juices
I like my job so much, that I consider it an act of generosity to let you do it for me. As part of my new "board" duties, I need to contribute suggested names for a company. This company owns farms and ranches in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, and grows soy, corn, wheat, rice and big, juicy cows. Winner gets a kilo of freshly crushed soy meal, suitable for feeding to housepets, assuming your housepet is a chicken you are trying to fatten.
[Ben H.: 5/19/04 14:47] |
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Beyond Criticism
The hometown papers reacted this morning with outrage to by "9-11 Commissioners" critical of the police and fire department performance. Check out, for example, today's New York Post front page. Now, let me say I don't disagree that the 9-11 commission has spent more time grandstanding than performing its stated task; and that a few members have conflicts of interest that lead them to try to rewrite history; and that John Lehman is, was, and probably always will be a douchebag tumescent with self-regard. Even so, the enraged reaction to Lehman's comments, which, in fairness, scored the command-and-control system of the NYC police and fire and not the performance of the personnel more generally, is demonstrably unhelpful. That a group of people has sacrificed or bravely faced danger may confer a certain immunity against questioning, say, its members motives or courage, but not tactics or strategy. (Forgive me for always going back to WWI analogies, but we all get to ride our hobbyhorses from time to time, no? It would be churlish and wrong to criticize the famous regiment of Newfoundlanders on the Somme who suffered 85% casualties in the first half-hour of the battle for being ninnies; however, it is eminently fair to ask whether it was intelligent to go over the top hundreds of meters behind one's own front line, get tangled in one's own barbed-wire, and expose the regiment to enemy machine gun fire well before even reaching the front?) And let's face it: NYC police and fire tactics were in many ways ineffective. Command-and-control did break down. No amount of bellowing and chest-beating about "heroes" and "sacrifice" -- indubitable as the heroism and sacrifice referred to may be -- should obscure these shortcomings.
Victor Davis Hanson writes about why western democracies have proven lethal in war against what he terms "slave armies." One of his key points is the importance of "civilian audit." That is, people outside the command structure have access to information and can and do review battle performance after the fact. SOme civilian body ulitmately holds the military to account for its performance -- not simply rewarding success and punishing failure -- but analyzing the roots of success or failure and taking appropriate remedial action.
NYC Police and Fire should face the same sort of "civilian audit." Yes, the 9-11 commission has put in a rather obnoxious performance and may fail to do a great job of "civilian audit." But if the press and the police and fire chief start waving a bloody shirt every time someone makes an attempt at "civilian audit", we'll never get anywhere...
[Ben H.: 5/19/04 07:02] |
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Who Will Do Anything for Cheap Oil, Again?
Bloomberg among the outlets reporting Kerry's comments that in contrast to the President, he would cease purchases of crude for the strategic petroleum reserve in order to relieve upward pressure on oil prices. I come down with Bush on this one. This is the strategic reserve, not some countercyclical fund. At the moment, we have not experienced an unexpected disruption to supply or physical shortages. For once, the President is acting consonant with free-market principles; the principles he has traduced on steel, agriculture, etc. The fact is that our strategic stock was undersized relative to political volatility of major oil exporters and the equilibrium level of US imports. Filling it is the right response. I admit that I am sceptical that US strategic stockbuilds have much to do with high crude prices, much less gasoline prices. Forget crude: crack spreads are at $18/bbl last I looked! Somebody whack the NIMBYites upside the head and permit a refinery or two!
Let me clarify: announced strategic stockbuilds. Do you think we could be building a larger-than-disclosed SPR? I always thought this would be a really shrewd move for the US. It's just the fundamental theorem of poker: the optimal behavior is that which makes the other guy play his hand the opposite of how he would play it if he knew your hand. A secret SPR could invite OPEC to overplay its hand disastrously.
Along the same lines, I've had a sneaking suspicion that perhaps China has some sub rosa stock-building going on... but, heck, I'm no expert and the crude analysts I talk to don't seem to buy it.
On a related note, the protocols-of-the-elders-of-crude school of political analysis doesn't pretend to the least consistency. The first gulf war was at the behest of the oil men; it lowered oil prices (after first raising them, but the no-blood-for-oil shit continued untroubled by the reversal of effect). Bush's decision to fill the SPR is at the behest of the oil men; it raises oil prices. Opening ANWR: the oil men again; it lowers prices. I don't deny that the interests of the oil industry (which is not monolithic: E&P players don't share interests of R&M guys, for example; and within each group, delta to crude prices, crack spreads, etc, are not uniform) get a hearing in DC, like any other interest group. But if one chooses to assert that oil is the mainspring of an administration's policy, at least look into the industry carefully enough to have the merest inkling of what is in the industry's interest.
[Ben H.: 5/18/04 17:04] |
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Gandhi Turns It Down...
And Indian markets rally (on the rumor last night, confirmed just now). How does that have to make you feel? The markets pass judgment on your worth as a political leader and conclude that you have a worth of negative 15 billion bucks or so!
Since Sonia G. has been much in the news, I'll take the opportunity to relate a somewhat germane story that probably both of you guys have heard, but which our (3? 4?) other readers have not.
Nearly 15 years ago, in my expository writing section there was this guy named Rahul. Despite his Indian name, he didn't really look Indian. His english was also rather poor, though not his kit: he wore a fat Rolex and pretty natty duds. He never volunteered to speak in class and rarely had a coherent answer when asked to contribute to discussion. I had the misfortune of serving as his "edit partner" a few times. The guy could barely put a paragraph together, which led me to wonder how he could have won admission to Harvard. The only useful suggestion he ever made to me was to correct some Italian phrase I had mistranscribed into an essay on, I believe, D.H. Lawrence's "Painted Tombs of Tarquinai" (god, Expos was fucking useless!), from which I learned that he spoke Italian fluently. I left for the summer still puzzled over this Rahul character and convinced he had probably failed Expos.
A few weeks later, my brother and I were lounging in front of the TV at home in Westchester. Tom Brokaw introduced a story on the recent assassination of Indian P.M. Rajiv Gandhi. The story cut to footage of his funeral, which had taken place earlier that day. The guy lighting the pyre looked awfully familiar. "Dude! That guy was in my Expos class!" I cried out. It was none other than Rahul; turned out he was Rahul Gandhi, son of Rajiv and Sonia, grandson of Indira. "I hope he didn't write the eulogy," I told Greg. "He can't write worth shit."
He never did come back to Harvard. Now he is a member of India's Parliament. And I'm a bond monkey. Maybe he made the right choice not coming back...
[Ben H.: 5/18/04 11:56] |
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Good Humor Me
I have very strong feelings about dessert, as you fellows know, namely what counts as a true dessert and what doesn't. My standards become even more minute and stringent when it comes to birthday cakes. Here at the office, we get a cake for everyone's birthday (made a lot more sense when there were three of us up in NY, a little less with 30), and typically the honoree has input to what sort of cake it is. To my frustration, many have selected confections I consider mere ersatz birthday cakes: cheesecakes, carrot cakes, fruity cakes, stuff like that. Those are not birthday cakes!
But I had a very encouraging experience today. One of our quant guys, a sharp computer scientist who only came over from China for grad school and still speaks with a very thick Beijing accent, celebrated his birthday. As his festive dessert, he selected a chocolate and vanilla ice-cream cake with vanilla icing, ringed on its sides with Waffeleten cookies and topped with an oreo every 30 degrees such that the top looked like a cookie-marked clock face. This, my friends, is a birthday cake. Naturally, I was impressed with his quick grasp of the essentials of the American birthday cake -- preponderance of chocolate and vanilla, uncomplicated sugary flavor, embellishment only with other pure dessert foods. What, I asked, did he usually do for a special birthday food back in China? THe answer was noodles -- the idea being that a long noodle symbolizes long life. That just impressed me more. Look at this I cried to my officemates circling vulterine around the cake. Andy just a few years ago was living in a place where birthday food means noodles, yet he has grasped the essense of the American birthday cake better than you pack of cheesecake-eating, carrot-cake nibbling ninnies! I have Sam Huntington's new book on my desk, but Andy's cake tells me the will to assimilate is alive and well... the problem is with the elites already here!
[Ben H.: 5/17/04 18:14] |
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Credit Analysis: It's The Little Things That Make the Difference
Assessing the creditworthiness of sovereigns is principally about the numbers. However, the relationship between sovereign borrower and lender is not fully reducible to a quantitative form. It has its personal aspects: the investor wants to know how far will a particular finance minister go to make sure a debt is paid in trying times, whether the numbers he reports are likely to be distorted, to what extent he can be trusted to carry out his commitments. As such, time spent at conferences where one gets to see policy-makers up close and personal, to mingle with them, pays dividends.
Down in Miami, the finance minister of Uruguay was in attendance. Reflecting on his presentation, a fellow-attendee who had not met the guy before told she took away from it a visceral suspicion of him -- he just looked untrustworthy to the point of sleaziness. Well, I've had some dealings with the guy and he never took any affirmative steps to cheat me, so I couldn't say I was immediately inclined to agree. But then she had a point about his suspicious face; his face -- I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but this face could best be described as a kind of lupine pumpkinhead -- swarthy, covered with five o'clock shadow at 9am, this face indeed is not the kind of face to inspire great confidence. Did I notice, she asked, that he showed up late to his own presentation? Well, yes, that is a little sketchy. He made some excuse about the alarm clock in his hotel room failing, but she noticed that after the dinner the previous night he did not appear on the bus heading back to the hotel, which meant that he had boarded the other bus, headed to some South Beach nightspot. It struck her as entirely possible he had come straight to his presentation from some nightclub, the stink of South Beach floozy still on his clothes. Well, yes, that would be recklessly inappropriate. Did I hear, she asked, his mobile phone go off during his own presentation? Oh, yeah, I did think that was pretty strange; but, be fair, he only looked at the caller ID, he didn't actually answer it… although now that you mention it, even Paul O'Neill would have known to ignore his phone. But the clincher for her, that elusive piece of data that crystallizes one's vague intuitions into an irrefutable conclusion: Did you hear what his ringtone was?, she asked -- Play That Funky Music Whiteboy! Can you really trust a 45 year old man with Play That Funky Music as his ring tone? Sweet Jesus! That's exactly what it was! That's just… wrong! What kind of a skeevy freak goes out of his way to make Play That Funky Music his ring tone? I'm persuaded. That's the kind of ironclad evidence you won't find in a dry SEC filing...
[Ben H.: 5/17/04 06:36] |
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Troy, The Shortcomings as Spleneticism as a Philosophy of Living, Fluorescent Cocktails, and Homeric Feminism: Your Correspondent Brings it All Together While Keeping His Blood-Pressure Under Control
Last night, just back from Miami, I had nothing to do and noticed that the Troy had opened down the block at the Cobble Hill Cinemas. As probably the only credentialed ex-classicist in the EM investment world, I have expected that the release of this film will instigate a lot of questions from coworkers and counterparties. What do you think, Ben, about Troy? You're a classicist, right? (In fact, having seen the previews, a few people already asked me what I think about the fact that a film called Troy is being made. So far, my non-committal response has been that it will be slightly more interesting than a film called Schenectady). I do feel a certain obligation not to disappoint, especially given the meager returns this esoteric knowledge has provided to my probable questioners, which to date has been to assure them that vega, though one of the so-called "Greeks", is not a genuine letter of the Greek alphabet.
I bought myself a ticket and took a seat. I don't have to tell you it was dreadful; and you don't need to have studied Homeric Greek under the sadistic tutelage of the late Emily D.T. Vermeule (I would append here: may the old bag rot in hell; but for reasons which will shortly become clear, instead: may she rest in peace) to quickly realize that the movie owes a greater debt to the classicism of Xena: Warrior Princess than to that of Homer or his many high-cultural re-interpreters.
Now, I have a nagging suspicion that many of the people who will soon ask me what I qua classicist thought of it don't really give a fig about that, but rather are more interested to be entertained by how I qua spelentic person will decry it in the red-faced, indigant rant they’re sure the question will provoke. Do not doubt for a minute that I could unleash an acidulous screed of considerable length about this movie's howlers, its woeful distortion of the plot facts and animating spirit of the source material, its embarassing flights of overacting, &c, &c. But as I prepared to do that, I felt thick Ate seizing hold of my phrenes (to stick with the classical theme), and mindful of the consequences, I stopped. I'll have something to say about this movie in a second, but it won't be a screed. I have decided to make a genuine effort to be less splenetic; or at least, to make sure not make Baroque Speleneticism my philosophy of life. Let me explain, and then back to Troy.
Down in Miami, I had a moment of what my fellow-classicists would call anagnoresis; touchy-feely types might call it a "moment of clarity." Friday, after the conference was over, I went over to Miami Beach to have dinner at what turned out to be a very self-consciously trendy restaurant (with the obligatory hip one-word name, in this case "Wish") amid the already high level of ambient hipsterism of Miami Beach. Part of the schtick of this restaurant is to serve "glowing" cocktails. They plunge into a colorful drink a plastic faux-icecube with some sort of engine of phosphorescence inside. The dictates of Baroque Spleneticism practically command one to launch into a tirade against such a thing: the pointless exoticism, the use of food and drink as a signifier rather than for gustatory pleasure. There's something just so gallingly feast-of-Trimalchio about a glowing cocktail, something that sets my mind bubbling with thoughts about the ceaseless quest for empty novelty, Bobo decadence, &c. My brain is humming with this line of thinking, and I can feel my spleen going from Bruce Banner-spleen to Incredible Hunk-spleen, and then: anagnoresis. I hear, in my head, these thoughts taking voice, and I realize that while it may turn out to have a few grains of truth, while it may be funny to the person across the table, to me it is not fake, posing-indignant but rather real-indignant, and if I start talking it is not going to make me less upset, but rather more upset. While it may get a laugh or two, or score a point or two, these particular laughs or points will come at the expense of my mental health. I look around and I see that it is a lovely, warm evening near the water in Miami, and the setting is quite congenial, and the company is good, and the food looks like it is going to be good (for the offer and explanation of glowing cocktails preceded any actual eating, and the inchoate screed certainly would have been fully cooked well before the food). There’s no reason to look past these little blessings, to negate the dulcifying effect of nice surroundings and fellowship and food, because of the real or alleged symbolic or psychosocial significance of a phosphorescent cocktail. Enough, already. The world will never fail to provide sufficient material for diatribes, but that’s not the siginificance of the world; and spleen can be fun and certainly an integral part of how I respond to the world, but if amidst a really enjoyable night out, slightly obnoxious tippling technology can set it off, it has ceased to be a facet of a personality, but has rather become a guiding philosophy.
OK. Troy. To repeat: a bad movie by the lights of a classicist, a bad movie period. But the cultural grave-robbery, the silly distortions, hammy overacting – all this I will refer to only by way of preterition. Instead, let me explain in a phlegmatic way how I found one particular and prominent deviation from the source material as revealing of modern sensibilities. The film gives a very prominent role to Briseis. In the Iliad, she is referred to in Book I and IX (maybe in one two other places), but only shows up for a brief moment in XXIV, lying in bed next to Achilles, after she has been restored to him. Recall that she has been awarded to Achilles as plunder, but Agammemnon takes her for himself after he is forced to relinquish his prize, and this precipitates Achilles’ refusal to fight. So, yes, this Briseis has a certain importance, but not really so much as a character as a chattel. Agammemnon could have taken some armor or, if Homer had been more like Edith Wharton, a particularly nice pickle-dish, and the story would be largely unchanged. The film turns her into a captured Trojan hieratic princess, who becomes Achilles’ great love, over whose mistreatment he can show his chivalrous side. She gets a few meaty soliloquies about the horrors of war and a few debates with Achilles about why he dedicates himself to war and killing. Things get even weirder at the end: Achilles runs through a falling Troy looking for Briseis (who has been allowed to return there) and finds her just having stabbed and killed Agammemnon; he goes to rescue her from Agammemnon’s guard, and a lurking Paris lets fly the lethal arrow. As he dies, he comforts Briseis, telling her, “you have brought me peace.” Call it Homeric feminism or feminist Homericism. Modern writers are so steeped in “alternative history” – that is, history from the point of view of the overlooked – that it must seem natural to them to bring a “marginalized” perspective to the center of the narrative. You can’t have a movie – even of the 3000 year-old epic of a patriarchal society -- without a central female character. The filmakers also embrace a facile equation of the female perspective with a pacifistic one. That’s not a case the ancients themselves were unwilling to make. But when Aristophanes styles the women of Greece going on a sex strike to get the men to stop warring (in Lysistrata), it’s a bit of japery. For the makers of Troy The Movie, there’s an earnest stuggle between the bloodthirsty militarism of Achilles – what psychobabblers would call “his demons” – and the allegedly redemptive influence of the irenic feminine priestess. It’s a moral anachronism. And I think it is enormously revealing about modern, western attitudes towards war and warmaking, that the even the ur-text of guts-and-glory martial epic can’t get remade without a vigorous nod to the idea of the “folly” of war.
[Ben H.: 5/16/04 15:27] |
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High School Part Two
Spend a few years in the emerging markets investing world and you will know everybody in it. Conferences remind me of high school -- the cliques, petty rivalries, remembered insults, and all. One such conference is what brought me to Miami. The dinner speaker last night was Michael Mussa, the very controversial former chief economist of the IMF. At a prior conference, in Argentina, Mussa gave a slightly tipsy post-prandial lecture about the Argentine crisis, which he laid at the feet of the feckless and incompetent Argentine political class; much of which was in attendance, this being a conference for local investors. The insult achieved greater piquancy from the giggling, smirking way he delivered his comments, not to mention his fr | |
