Matins

¶ If you want to lose our attention, just offer us a list of ten things. If we’re very bored, we may give it a glance, just to see how silly you are and probably to laugh at your expense. If Bob Cringely hadn’t been so entertainingly upset by a 24/7 list of the ways in which Americans “waste money” (ie, make discretionary purchases), we’d never have learned that there’s somebody out there who things that dry cleaning is optional — remind us not to sit next to that person! ¶ Abdul Fattah John Jandali, 80 and flourishing in Nevada, talks about his biological son, the guy who brought you the iPhone. (Ya Libnan; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Lauds

¶ At the Guardian, Mark Prescott asks, “Opera reviews: why does no one write about the music?” Actually, music critics write about almost everything but the music, for the simple reason that writing intelligibly about music is just about the hardest thing in the world to do. With regard to opera, though, we’re living in an era of silly, director-led “conceptions” of familiar classics that, in our view, clutter the stage and get in the way of the singing — but provide critics with nifty copy. ¶ Helen Mirren compares Michael Parkinson (whose 1975 “sexist interview” with the actress remains a must-see) with Russell Brand, who, she tells the Guardian, likes women, and not a lot of men do.” Having played Prospero, she now wants to play Hamlet. ¶ Nige reminds us of the death of Eric Blore, foretold in the pages of The New Yorker by Kenneth Tynan.

Prime

¶ We used to think that Jamie Dimon was the one reputable banker on Wall Street. Simon Johnson’s story about the folly of banks paying dividends right now (thus reducing their capital) mentions Mr Dimon’s “theory of excess capital,” which sounds like the sort of thing that a powerful man can make others listen to, nodding approvingly — but still crazy. (The Baseline Scenario) ¶ Whatever your opinion of Keynesian fiscal theory may be, there’s no question that Tyler Cowen identifies the functional problem that, Clinton-era good fortune aside, has bedeviled its implementation:

The technocratic Keynesian recommendation was to run deficits in bad times and surpluses in good times. But except for one stretch during the Clinton administration, this notion has been broken since the early 1980s. In the United States, at least, Keynesian economics has failed to find the necessary political institutions to enact and sustain a wise version of the theory.

Curiously, Tyler doesn’t regard this absolutely crucial insight as one worth exerpting in his own afterpost at Marginal Revolution. At least he doesn’t see the political weakness of Keynesian theory to be too obvious to mention. ¶ A True Historie and Account of McKinsey & Co, by Yves Smith! We dropped everything and read to the last word. Our favorite line: the writer’s personal recollection of Citibank in the reign of John Reed. “ I was on the Citibank team, where the client was smart and aggressive but often didn’t apply its energies to the best ends: the joke was that it was a “fire, aim, ready” organization.”

Tierce

¶ All about PKMzeta, the protein that strengthens synapses, thus enhancing memory. At Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong tells us how the elimination of PKHzeta — there’s a chemical called ZIP that does the job — erases long-term memories irreversibly. The discovery, made by a team led by Todd Saktor at SUNY Downstate, doesn’t so much answer questions as refine them. One conjecture: PKMzeta enforces the survival of the fittest memories.

Memories are incredibly important, so why are they always teetering on the edge of disappearance? It probably has something to do with flexibility. The vulnerable nature of our memories allows us to easily update our entire network with new information. Without this flexibility, we’d be incapable of learning new things – a flaw that’s just as dangerous as the threat of memory loss.

¶ At HTMLGiant, Amy McDaniel muses anecdotally on favorite authors and ageing — or, in her case, getting older. She doesn’t quite say so, but the suggestion is implicit that, while we do outgrow adelescent tastes, the books that we love in earlier maturity will probably always been dear. (If only we had more time to get back to them!)

Sext

¶ Whitney Carpenter discloses the delightful if sordid truth about her fondness for special notebooks, pens, and other writing paraphernalia (id est: they protect her from having to write) with an understated candor that brings the more unspeakable sexual preferences to mind. (The Bygone Bureau)

Notebooks, as any notebook enthusiast will tell you, have a legacy, and all of that timelessness can weigh on a person. The pressure to do justice to the notebook, to write something as classic and romantic as the paper housing it, is just too much; I can never muster the courage to begin.

But there is something worse than a lot of pristine, untouched notebooks, and that is a lot of notebooks filled with the logorrhea of callow youth. Whitney is right: get rid of the things now! ¶ How delicious: Walter Kirn on Charlie Sheen. It’s almost redemptive, but only almost. We’ve never seen the show about fractions of men, and we can’t imagine tweeting about degraded actors with “very small holes in the center of his pupils where the ‘twinkle’ used to go,” but this entry from the writer’s new blog, Permanent Morning, makes us feel that we’ve had all the possible fun of doing so. “ He is the great Third Person Outside the Room that allows loosely associated strangers interacting on Twitter etc. to engage in synthetic confidential intimacy.” ¶ The ever-bad Dave Bry owes Streit’s Bakery twenty-two cents, the thief. It seems that matzo and camembert go well together, especially if the cracker is a Moonstrip from Rivingtton Street. Also that the bakery isn’t a particularly well-run shop.

Nones

¶ At 3 Quarks Daily, Omar Ali tries to get to the bottom of the Raymond Davis affair: does it signify a spat or a divorce between Pakistan’s ISI and our CIA? The larger importance of his piece lies in its firmly post-colonial thinking. “First of all, it is true that I assume that people in Pakistan have plans and ambitions of their own. I also assumes that the US is not some kind of God-like power.” Indeed, in Mr Ali’s view, the people of Pakistans have less to fear of the Amerricans than of their own “suicidal” elites.

Vespers

¶ Mary Beard is unhappy with a new book about “Elagabalus,” the Roman boy-emperor who reigned for four years from 218 and to whom the most shocking reputation for “decadence” was attached by the fourth century. The author of the new book, a Spaniard with a grandee’s name, Leonardo de Arrizabagala y Prado (we like the hint of acronymic connection to the emperor), has set out to distinguish fact from fiction, and wound up with a long, and in Beard’s view fatuous, list of “don’t knows.” The one story that Harold Nicholson omits from his tut-tutting account of Elegabalus is the one about smothering his dinner guests with rose petals. (TLS; via Brainiac) ¶ At Speakeasy, a taste of Anne Roiphe’s “Memoir of Lus Without Reason”: the glory (gory?) days at The Paris Review, when men wore ties and arm candy.

And then there was alcohol. It is hard to imagine these parties, this world without the clinking of ice in a glass, without the amber liquids loosening tongues, inhibitions, raging ambitions, hiding fears of failure, covering the tracks of depression and insecurity that might otherwise blight the scene. Yes, these were very intelligent and enormously gifted men and they lusted and they argued, they had sex like cave men on the savanna, or so they hoped.

Today’s writers seem a more cautious lot, less interested in some macho image that must be projected against an imaginary screen and perhaps they are less admiring of Hemingway and his giant fish than their elders.  Feminism, endless wars, a society in turmoil, civil rights, may have saved the current crop of writers from the long nights of their predecessors. But I’m sure the new crop of writers  have their own way to tumble down, to make their lives hard, and the sight probably isn’t pretty either.

But what is certain is that talent does not protect and that the drive to be an artist may set your hair on fire causing first degree burns. This is what happened with these writers before the height of the sixties and the sexual revolution would bring the rest of America into the party. This happened when I was very young and didn’t understand that a sleeping child’s breath on your neck is worth far more than any novel and that wild drink is not an answer to any inner yearning and that Art is fine but only one of the Mistresses of happiness and sometimes She is cruel in her demands.

¶ In an excellent essay at The Millions, Gabriel Brownstein surveys the field of “Jewish fiction,” only to give David Henry Hwang the last word: “ He talked of friends, fine playwrights with unspectacular careers, who had never been categorized, and said, look, that’s why they never took off.  You need to get categorized in order to succeed.” Surely this is not the old-fashioned business of categorizing and pigeonholing. Rather, it’s a kind of tagging.

Compline

¶ JR Lennon puts his finger (unintentionally, perhaps) on what makes us uncomfortable about writing programs — the (to us) meretricious patina of academic rigor. Teachers can do no more than grade a moment of excitement that may or may not turn out to be durable — no one can say.

If you ever wonder why creative writing classes often seem to be graded rather generously, this is the reason.  Everything is a gray area.  Nothing can be judged out of context.  There are no things you can’t do, and there are no things that always work.  There are only…things.  An infinite number.  And they can be arranged in an infinite number of ways.  It’s enough to make me think my job might actually be…difficult.

We’re all for writing programs. And we can see why calling them a kind of school is probably the easiest way to fund them, and to bring togetther But we have completely outgrown any faith in the product of writing programs. (Ward Six; via HTMLGiant) ¶ At Slate, Farhad Manjoo denounces the “snoots” who complain wheneverNPR devotes an iota of attention to the likes of Michael Jackson or Justin Bieber (plantinum- and chrome-plated junk, both of them). We agree that complaining is unattractive: we don’t listen to NPR anymore. For one thing, we don’t have the time! We just learned that we’ve read 155K Google Reader feeds in the past two years — lots and lots of which featured “Justin Bieber” in the headline. At least we didn’t have to listen! (via The Morning News)

Have a Look

¶ Helvetica and the New York City Subway System @ Brain Pickings. ¶ “The Drinking Man’s New Orleans” @ A Continuous Lean. ¶ Marc Giai-Miniet’s miniatures @ The Best Part. ¶ Next time, leave your camera at home: “Most Tourists Take Pictures from the Same Spot” @ The Online Photographer. ¶ Grace Bonney is having a stripes crisis. Help her out @ Design Sponge. ¶ Slam-dunking robot seal, gifted with stereo vision and, of course, great mechanicals. (Discoblog)

Noted

¶ Donald Trump’s loutishness continues unabated. (Joe.My.God)  ¶ The  editors of The Bygone Bureau revisit Pokemon, which all but two were deeply involved with. Darryl Campbell just missed the fad, by going off to high school, and Jonathan Gourlay was already a dirty old man.

Who controls the sovereign wealth fund that Col Qaddafi’s son, Seif, set up a few years ago? Most of it appears to sit in Libyan banks, beyond the reach of Western sanctions.

The fund’s nominal head is Muhammad H. Layas, perhaps Libya’s most experienced international banker. He has had a leadership role in institutions including the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank, the only bank allowed to conduct international business during the imposition of United Nations sanctions against Libya; British-Arab Commercial Bank, a London-based wholesale bank now majority owned by Libya; and the Arab Banking Corporation, a Bahrain-based bank also majority controlled by Libya.

But while he was the titular head, bankers who have had dealings with the fund say that the real power was wielded by Mustafa Zarti, a close friend of Mr. Qaddafi whose title is deputy chief executive.

Brash and with an “in-your-face” style, according to people who dealt with him, Mr. Zarti went to school with Mr. Qaddafi in Austria. He is also his partner in a tuna farming enterprise, R. H. Marine Services, on the west coast of Libya.

Bankers who dealt with Mr. Zarti said he fancied himself quite a deal maker — very much taken with glossy Wall Street names like Goldman Sachs — and was known for his impulsive and unsuccessful investment decisions, like investing in Royal Bank of Scotland before it was bailed out.

We especially liked this part: “People who worked closely with the fund said that its inner workings were largely a mystery as bureaucratic inertia and lack of investment expertise kept it from being more active.”

At the beginning of George Nolfi’s The Adjustment Bureau, David Norris (Matt Damon) is a rising young politico who’s all set to win one of New York’s Senate seats. No sooner has this been established then David’s campaign is torpedoed by the publication of a photograph of him mooning his classmates at a college reunion. As the dismal returns come in on election night, David retreats from the ballroom at the Waldorf to the men’s room, to compose his concession speech. Eventually a young woman (Emily Blunt) emerges from one of the stalls. She and David are instantly simpatico. You can tell from their banter that they belong together, and it is not surprising that they come together in a long kiss. But David has a speech to make, and before he kind find out anything about the girl, she’s capering off, with hotel security at her heels. David returns to the ballroom and gives a speech that puts his political future back on track.

Later in the movie, we will learn that Elise, the girl in the bathroom, was put there according to The Plan. Originally, in fact, she was intended to be David’s great love, but the Plan was changed, it seems, when the Planner (be patient with me) grasped that, while a dash of Elise might inspire David to make a boffo speech, a constant diet of her company would make him fat and happy, scuttling his ambitions and the prizes for which the Plan intended them. That’s why the gents from the Adjustment Bureau   — call them angels, call them agents of fate, but don’t try too hard to figure out what they are; this is just a movie — intervene when David bumps into Elise on a Broadway bus and gets her name and phone number. David was never supposed to get on that bus. He was supposed to have coffee spilled on his shirt as he crossed Madison Square Park on his morning commute, obliging him to go back home for a change, thereby missing an Adjustment Bureau intervention at the offices of his best friend, campaign manager, and new boss, a hedge fund manager called Charlie Traynor (Michael Kelly). But an adjuster who is unprofessionally sympathetic to David (Anthony Mackie) slips up, and fails to arrange for the spill. The upshot is that David gets a look, as one of the adjusters (John Slattery) puts it, behind a curtain that he didn’t know existed.

The Adjustment Bureau  is not going to please everybody — not right away. It’s going to take some viewers time and effort to see through the film’s jazzy surface to the mythic romance beneath. And even then, they may feel that mythic romance is wasted on David and Elise, not because they’re individually unworthy but because together they will probably  make a pair of mushy lovebirds.

So whether or not you find The Adjustment Bureau satisfying is going to depend a lot on how able Mr Damon and Ms Blunt are to convince you that the characters they’re playing are consumed by longing  — an undertaking that is greatly handicapped by the snappy worldliness with which this vital couple meets the world. It has been decreed by The Plan that David will move from Congress to the Senate to the White House, while Elise will blossom into the finest choreographer of her generation. Mr Nolfi asks us, in effect, to believe that old-fashioned true love could resign his two sharp cookies to careers more mediocre than stellar. The actors left no doubt in my mind that they would.

The movie’s other hurdle is the Adjustment Bureau itself — another quirky artefact from the mind of Philip K Dick. The Bureau is presented as an old-fashioned big-time insurance company, with lofty lobbies, hushed corridors, and mahogany doors. It is constituted exclusively by men who wear not only suits but fedoras — it turns out that the agents’ power actually comes from wearing the hats. Surely this no longer evokes the image of Daddy that it once did, and I wonder how much trouble Mr Nolfi is going to get into for playinig the Bureau scenes as though they were set in the 1940s. I expect that young men who see his picture will be tempted to try to rationalize his metaphysics, implausible as they are. (I wish that their cerebrations could be dealt with by adjuster Terence Stamp’s trademark understated menace.) I sat back and enjoyed the show, which consisted primarily of walking through doorways into entirely unexpected spaces; in the run-up to the climax, David, wearing one of those hats, leads Elise through a doorway at the courthouse and onto the field at Yankee Stadium, with Liberty Island the next stop. It’s visually stunning stuff that only a killjoy would sniff at.

 The current of heroic myth runs very strong in this movie. It’s a current of stories, not meanings. The Magic Flute and Die Frau ohne Schatten both came to mind, as David and Elise embraced possibly for the last time, determined not to live without their love. So did the story of Orpheus. I don’t mean to suggest that The Adjustment Bureau is an important motion picture. It’s much too early to tell how celebrated and cherished the Planner intends it to be.

What’s this? Manohla Dargis likes this movie too? That has never happened! That we agree, I mean. And I swear that I wrote this page before reading hers, discovering that she deploys “torpedo” in the very same way.

Floyd Norris comments on the good news about employment.

But for now note that the last time the unemployment rate fell 0.9 percentage points in three months was in 1983. That was when the economy finally started to rise rapidly after the early 1980’s double-dip recessions.

An important point to remember is that almost every economic statistic has been looking up, with the notable exception of the jobs figure. Now it seems to be falling in line.

A Happy International Progress Day to you and yours!

Some clueless young persons who have founded an elite organization, the Native Club, were evidently unaware that the first rule of such associations is supposed to be a ban on publicity. No talking to the Times!  The second rule — anybody can rent a room at the Plaza — to to occupy a building to which you can deny entry by non-members.   

Membership parameters have also loosened. It’s no longer restricted to people who understand that the soft-shell crabs are the thing to order at Swifty’s. The group now includes musicians from the Lower East Side, a painter on the Upper West Side, even folks who hail from far-off lands like Connecticut (you can be an “honorary member” if you’re born outside the city, so long as you display the Native mind-set, Mr. Estreich explained).

Larger parties, like the one at the Plaza, amount to rush parties, where candidates are brought for inspection. A counsel of 14 administrators functions like a Sutton Place co-op board and decides whom to admit.

For the inner circle, there are also private parties, drawing 25 or so to members’ East Side town houses or art-filled SoHo lofts. No one talks about the rituals at those events. “That’s where we burn lambs,” joked Freddie Fackelmayer, a member who wears his hair in a dramatic swoop of forelocks — call it the Fop Flop — familiar from a thousand Ralph Lauren ads.

The other day, I was about to step into the shower when I realized that there was no water. There was no water in the line of my bathroom, nor that of Kathleen’s; neither was there running water in the laundry room across the hall. It took more than an hour for the senior doorman to nail down an explanation: the pump was broken.( In any Manhattan building over a certain height — six or seven floors, roughly — city water has to be pumped into the rooftop tanks that are such a distinctive feature of the neighborhood skyline.) At the same time that José learned about the pump he was told that an electrician was working on the problem. But by this time a rumor had taken hold: that the Second Avenue subway excavators had hit a water main. I heard it myself from the check-out ladies at Food Emporium, when I went back for a second hoard of Deer Park 2.5 gallon jugs. (The first three jugs I’d carried up myself — not a good idea; I had the second batch delivered.) I didn’t correct them; I wasn’t entirely sure that I knew better, notwithstanding José’s assurances. 

Back upstairs, I read the last pages of the book by Eduardo Porter that I would write up later in the day — not very well, I’m afraid. Although I never quite freaked out on Tuesday, I was subject to agitated aftershocks long after the water came back on. Panne d’eau is the worst thing that can happen in the house without actually damaging it. (There’s no reason to compare the drawbacks of losing power, because “no electricity” means “no pump” means — “no water.”) At least it is at my house. The only way that I could be less of a desert person would be to move into a houseboat. I am wretched without two short showers a day, and I am always giving my hands a light wash. If I believed in divine intervention, then Thomas Crapper would be my god. (Correction: he would constitute, together with John Harington and Joseph Bramah, my holy trinity.) I regard the loss of running water as something much worse, and more frightening, than an inconvenience.

But I soldiered on with Porter’s final chapter, which deals with the environmental apocalypse that already seemed to have begun chez moi. I had fifteen gallons of water and a promise from Kathleen that we would stay at a hotel if the water didn’t come back on. Also, I had arranged to run down to a friend’s flat at about one, if I couldn’t take a shower at home;  and, if it came to that, I would take him out to lunch afterward. So I was set. I was almost at the end when I heard a strange roiling noise, such as might be made by a very large but very muffled washing machine. It came primarily from the direction of my bathroom, which is right next to the room where I work, but it really came from everywhere. I got up to investigate (hope springs eternal), and indeed as I neared the bathroom the sound became more distinct, taking on bubbling, gurgling notes. This went on for about ten ten minutes. Every now and then it would taper off, and my heart would sink, but the intermissions were never long, and at long last a filthy brown liquid streamed from the tap. What must have happened is that the pump stopped working hours before anyone noticed, and the water ran out when the tank was empty. The fresh water pouring into it, now that the pump was working again, was stirring up all the sediment that accumulates naturally over time and that periodically has to be cleaned out (meaning “no water” for several hours — but with plenty of advance notice). The water came back on at about a quarter past twelve; it was well past one before the water was clear enough to think of using to wash out a teapot, much less fill it.

Now I have five jugs of bottled water, and what am I going to do with them? Rather, where can I store them? The balcony is tempting, but experience teaches that it’s a bad idea. The jugs will get dirty, and the highly variable temperature will — well, I don’t know what it will do to the water, but it will make me not want to drink anything that has been sitting through sun and chill. Eventually, the jugs will develop very slow leaks. No, if I’m going to put the jugs out on the balcony, I might just as pour them down the drain, or take them to the service elevator room, for scavenging by the handymen and the porters. (Who aren’t needy enough, however, to lug jugs of bottled water to their homes in the outer boroughs.) I really would like to have the water on hand, Just In Case. And there you have it: I’m so perplexed by this pressing domestic difficulty — the jugs are sitting quite impossibly on the foyer floor, very much in the way — I can’t think of anything more interesting to write about. I was going to muse on Alan Riding’s book about the arts in Occupied France, but, frankly, the water problem is less depressing, at least now that it’s over.  

As everyone knows, American working women earn less than their male counterparts. Gail Collins, not a hawker of pie in the sky, suggests why that may change.

Americans are so used to the fact that women are capable of doing anything that we hardly ever discuss it. It’s been a long time since the leader of NASA said “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach.”

A change that happened later, and the one that’s going to be driving the future, is that women’s ability to succeed in their work life is now a matter of concern for both sexes. The turning point for American women really came on the unknown day when the average American couple started planning their futures with the presumption that there would be two paychecks. In a country where no one has real power without a serious economic role, we entered a time when, whether we liked it or not, all hands were needed to keep the economic ship afloat. Even women who get the opportunity to stay home when their children are young have to be ready to jump back into the work force if their partner is suddenly laid off.

A while back, I was visiting a college in Connecticut where most of the students were the first in their families ever to go beyond high school. I was talking with a group of young men and women, and I asked the men how many of them felt it was very important that their future wife be a good earner.

All of them raised their hands.

When we were young, the position of symphony orchestra conductor was an appointment for life, and holding more than one post was uncommon. We’re just saying.

If the good old ways had been kept up, then everyone would have been spared the embarrassing tease of the Metropolitan Opera’s James Levine’s health-related absences from his other job in Boston.

Mr. Levine acknowledged that he might have bitten off too much. “From the very beginning I didn’t handle both jobs completely smoothly,” he said. “There was always for me a tightness in the schedule between finishing a group of things here and then having to go right away to another group of things somewhere else.” As a younger, healthier man, he said, he could handle that.

[snip]

Mr. Levine’s health problems sometimes seem to be scrutinized like those of a political leader or pope because he is an enormously influential figure in classical music. He plays a central role in one of the world’s leading opera houses, has the devotion of many major singers and directs one of the top orchestras around.

He has a large fan base and attracts donors. Administrators rely on his leadership to keep their institutions musically excellent. Audience members buy tickets for him, not — at least not yet — for the likes of his substitutes, including Sean Newhouse, an assistant conductor for the Boston orchestra who led Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 last weekend.

If Mr Levine were to die, or to retire altogether from the podium, his reputation as one of the greatest conductors of the Twentieth Century would be secure. Ambition at this stage is unseemly.