When I saw in the paper today that Andrew Gold died, I couldn’t really place him. His song, “Thank You For Being A Friend,” came back, dimly, but not in any particular voice. It wasn’t until I saw the album cover for All This And Heaven Too at Joe.My.God that the full blast of the late-Seventies sensation came back to me. Lord, how I loved that album! Or did I? Only two song titles are familiar; the other one is Never Let Her Slip Away, which I loved to pieces. To pieces! And yet it had slipped completely out of my mind; I didn’t even miss it! (If something had ever brought a fragment of it to mind, I’d have scoured the work of Harry Nilsson or Lowell George or Rupert Holmes in search of it.) I just listened to it now, thanks to iTunes, where I bought it as well, and soon it will be on the Nano that I take on errands. This wonderful modern world! This crazy modern world, I mean, where you can live for thirty-three years without thinking of a song, where there are such songs (to be loved to pieces and absolutely forgotten), and then, hey presto, the singer dies and everyone hauls out his stuff. Last time I looked, the import pressing of the All This And Heaven Too was priced at Amazon somewhere in the neighborhood of $175. I remember when that sort of thing used to happen to LPs. Which is why I’m the sort of person who would consider, however briefly, paying nearly two hundred dollars for a compact disc: I need hard copy.

It’s warm again, but it’s still fairly dry. I’ve just come in from a round of errands. I wasn’t in the mood for errands, but on Saturday I ordered a veal tenderloin at Eli’s. They don’t — surprise surprise — carry the cut as a matter of course. It was just dumb luck that wafted me into the store two weeks ago on the very day that, for some reason, they were stocking it. I was terrified to think of the cost of an entire tenderloin, but that’s what I had to order. Turns out to be about a pound, just enough for four. At less than $10 a slice, that’s not so very bad. The only question is, what am I going to do with it? When I ordered it, I wasn’t thinking. Or rather, I was thinking about ordering a veal tenderloin in the abstract. I wanted to declare my interest in the ordering of veal tenderloin in a way that the butcher at Eli’s would best appreciate. Sadly, however, I have no use for veal tenderloin today. The meat went straight into the freezer, because Kathleen talked me out of putting an impromptu dinner party together over the weekend. It’s going to be hot, and I’m going to be tired. I’m in that ten-day trough before a Remicade infusion that I wrote about in March.  Which also explains my ordered the veal tenderloin. The grey cells are not firing on all cylinders. 

I want to save what zip and vim I’ve got this weekend for Will. Will was in Washington last weekend; his father was best man in a wedding. He himself wore a tux, like his dad and the other men in the wedding party; and, like them, he wore black Converse high-tops with his black tie. He wasn’t actually wearing a tie, but my hunch is that any Manhattan-born kid who grows up in Alphabet City and wears his first tuxedo before he’s eighteen months old will probably grow up to be even more sophisticated than Woody Allen. Even if he does retain an attachment to Shaun the Sheep. Megan stumbled on the Shaun the Sheep series at Netflix by happy accident. And I do mean “happy,” because this stop-motion animation by the makers of Wallace and Gromit is superbly watchable, and before you accuse me of losing my self-respect I’ll tell you why: there is no dialogue as such. There is a great deal of baa-ing and barking and moaning and groaning, and it is always perfectly clear what is happening, and what is about to happen. But you have to watch, because there are no dialogue cues. No corny jokes, no tedious talking down to kidlets. I expect that Shaun the Sheep was made in this way because the filmmakers tapped German financing, but it’s a model that ought to be widely followed in children’s entertainment. (There’s only so much of Adam Sandler singing “Fare-wElmo!” that I can take.) The episode in which Shaun engineeers a pizza-buying expedition is delightful, by the way, and, as for Will, he already knows that the part where the three pigs try to scare the sheep is going to scare him, and he wants to be held.

Reading James Surowiecki’s column in The New Yorker just now (“The Warrren Court“), it occurred to me that we must be more careful about using the word “competition.” I haven’t researched the matter, but I believe that the word is of greatest use in the commercial world, where it describes behavior designed to attract voluntary transactions with opposite parties who have several merchants or bankers or service providers to choose from. As such, any connection with the violence of plunder is unfortunate. It’s probably best to avoid talking of “competition for resources” among plants and animals, who are not known to intend any such thing. (Some sexual rivalries are competitive, but those ending in the death or dismemberment of a contender are not.) It is also unwise to speak of competition in connection with banking. Bankers are the most natural monopolists in the world, and as the history of banking in New York City alone will attest, they swallow each other up with gusto — eliminating competition. Bankers are not interested in providing “the best service” or “the best interest rates” or the best of anything. They’re interested only in having the most “assets” — other people’s money on deposit (and technically the bankers’ liabilities). Bankers, like doctors and lawyers, are not, as a rule, good businessmen, as is attested by the numbers of gifted lawyers, doctors and bankers who have become successful businessmen by moving outside the confines of professional frameworks. In any case, Mr Surowiecki’s argument that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau will be good for banks because it will improve competition is certain to fall on very deaf ears.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 7th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.