Gotham Diary:
Wobbles or Spins?
19 December 2014
Christmas has come early. Anyone interested in watching the world turn can look for new spins, now that one of the last fronts of the Cold War has dissolved in diplomatic exchanges between Washington and Havana, and the Ponzi-esque futility of Vladimir Putin’s management schemes for Russia is expressing itself in the plunge of the ruble toward worthlessness. Neither of these developments marks the beginning or the end of anything, but rather a sharp plot twist in the middle. It’s more than a little depressing to hear that American businessmen are salivating at the prospect of developing markets in Cuba and to see that the Times regards this as newsworthy; it would have been nice to spend at least a week contemplating the non-commercial aspects of renewed relations between the tired old enemies. As for Russia, it’s very difficult not to wonder what the impact will be on Manhattan real-estate prices. Will the kleptocrats vamoose, and settle down in their pieds-à-terre, gradually becoming Americans? If so, we ought to call them Green Russians, for the color of their dollars. But what if there is a sell-off, as the Russians try to liquidate their assets? Could spell bust-o-rama for that tippy-tall tower next door to Kathleen’s office. I have no idea what to expect, which is of course what makes idle speculation so much fun.
Then, in The New York Review, I read with delight that Rupert Murdoch is finally Getting Old, as in maybe leaving us soon. In a postscript to the acquittal of Rebekah Brooks, Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes,
There are signs that Murdoch’s attention is flagging, and what might be politely called his increasing eccentricity is magnified by his addiction to Twitter — that device helpfully enabling people to write faster than they can think — with such effusions as “Why is Jewish owned press so consistently anti Israel in ever crisis?” or “Moses film attacked on Twitter for all white cast. Since when are Egyptians not white? All I know are.”
I wonder if the Powell Era is drawing to a close. The period in which businessmen and their professional advisers heeded the call of the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Powell, made not long before he joined the Court, to repel the “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” shows signs of having played itself out. In a 1971 memorandum addressed to a friend at the US Chamber of Commerce, Powell essentially revived the axiom that what is good for American business is good for the United States — that commercial prosperity determines the welfare of American people, and that that’s all there is to it. Certainly there is no welfare without prosperity. But we have learned the hard way that business will not benefit the American people at all if it is not directed to do so. The American free enterprise system, to the extent that it is a system at all, must be subordinated to a more far-sighted system of social equity.
Does that sound like socialism to you? Socialism is in sore need of a major re-think. The theories of socialism that were developed in the Nineteenth Century are crude and useless, and it won’t do to lump every economic notion that is critical of capitalism under the “socialist” rubric. Capitalism, as none saw better than the observers of the Nineteenth Century, is vital to the launch of new businesses — new industries especially. Whether it continues to be necessary, however, for the sustaint established businesses, is much less certain. Today’s private equity racket, which generates lots of bankers’ fees and inflated asset trades but little in the way of real value and, what’s really intolerable, jobs, suggests that capitalism can be bogus, quite the opposite of creative. Indeed, much of what passes for “business” today isn’t business at all, but financial shuffling. There is good evidence that some capitalist maneuvers have become reflexive rather than purposeful.
And it is always to be borne in mind that the capitalist’s ideal number of employees is always zero. Like all ideals, zero is unattainable, but it does inspire the thought that, no matter how many employees are on the payroll, there could be fewer.
For about twenty years now, the populations of the Western World have been greatly distracted by the introduction of devices that have transfigured access to information. As these devices become more familiar, we can expect that more attention will be paid to the information, and less to the devices; and we can only hope that this will accompanied by increased concern for the quality of information. One cannot help imagining that more and more Americans are going to get a clearer picture of the country’s economy, not from television news, which is just another corporatized operation, but from ground-up reports on the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. It must always be remembered that the conflagration in Bosnia was triggered, prior to the appearance of these devices, by radio broadcasts “informing” Christian Serbians that their Muslim Bosnian neighbors were about to murder them en masse. It is terrifying to imagine the unrest that a similar campaign of disinformation could cause via Twitter.
***
In the bedroom upstairs, we had a cabinet or case, made by the now out-of-business Sorice outfit, that held I don’t know how many pop CDs. Let’s say, somewhere between 150 and 200. These were, by and large, CDs that Kathleen liked to play, but also the classic bands that still appeal to me, such as Steely Dan and Blind Faith. That’s why I didn’t break them down, and store them more compactly in the bins the house the vast bulk of our discs. There was, however, no place to put this CD case in the new apartment. In our first or second week here, I emptied the case into a couple of large canvas tote bags, and stuck them behind my reading chair in the bedroom. The other day, after I opened the last of the non-book boxes, I found that I needed that corner behind my chair for other things, so the tote bags came out into the foyer, where they are not welcome, and I had to deal with them.
Which means I’ve had to get to work breaking them down. Here’s how: I take the CD itself out of the jewel box and slip it into a windowed sleeve (sold in boxes of 800 by Uline). Then I slip the little booklet that also serves as the CD cover on top of the sleeve. Now comes the hard part: removing the CD couch from the jewel box so that I can get the back matter, from which the spins are folded. I put the back matter on top of the booklet, making sure that everything is pointing in the right direction, and then insert this loose package into the proper place in the bins: “Ronettes” comes after “Rolling Stones.” The spine along the right edge of the back matter continues to serve the same purpose. If frequent access to the CDs were required, the spines would soon fall apart, but I kept my classical CDs in this way for nearly ten years now, with no signs of wear and tear. The point of the exercise, of course, is that the contents of a CD jewel box occupy, on their own, less than a third of the volume of the jewel box.
Now I find that the CD of The Nightfly, Donald Fagen’s first solo album, is missing. I have the jewel box and the paper, but not the disc itself. I uploaded the album onto my laptop computer some time ago, so I’ve got the music. I can’t remember what prompted this, but we were playing The Nightfly (on a Nano) and I noticed a bass riff that sounded a lot like something from “Spanish Dancer,” my favorite cut on Steve Winwood’s Arc of a Diver. Who was listening to whom? I had to get both albums to compare dates. Was the CD missing then? (I wouldn’t have opened the jewel box.) Where could it be? Astonishingly, the album is out of print.
I was looking for the jewel box last night, because I’d been listening to the music while breaking down CDs, and wondering where it was. Also, I wanted to know for sure that the word shouted out at the end of the first verse of “Walk Between the Raindrops,” preceded by a rising glissando roar, is “Miami!” But that must have been an improvisation, because nothing appears in the booklet.
Bon weekend à tous!