Matins

¶ Here’s a page to bookmark for ready-reference: Keith Hennessey, an economic adviser to George W Bush, outlines the roles of the various White House economic advisers. Now, you, too, can master the difference between the NEC and the CEA! In the alternative, you can see the fungal spread of medieval jurisdictional kudzu thick enough to forestall any and all presidential initiative! (via Economists For Firing Larry Summers)

Mr Hennessey sketches the mechanics of proposing a $1/gallon gasoline tax.

If you have two from NEC (running the meeting) and the Chief’s office, and only one from each other shop (don’t forget the other senior White House Advisors listed above), that’s at least 18 people in the room.  At least.  Each has a legitimate claim to be there, and each has a view on whether the President should support a $1 gas tax increase.

I would guess that in the Obama White House they would also include Carol Browner, who has a new role as an Assistant to the President for Energy & Environment Issues (one of the new czars), as well as Valerie Jarrett, who among other things handles State and local issues for the President.  If the Feds raise gas taxes, that makes it harder for the States to do the same.

On a straightforward question like a gas tax increase for which the substantive analysis is easy, there would probably be three meetings:  one of mid-level White House and Agency staff chaired by the NEC Deputy or the NEC Special who handles energy issues, a principals meeting of Cabinet-level officials and senior White House advisors chaired by the NEC Director, and then a meeting with the President.  I’d guess that maybe 200-300 man-hours (of very senior people) would precede a 45-minute decision meeting with the President.

(Hennessey post too long? Try Weakonomics.)

Lauds

¶ At The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones writes about the new Arcade Fire album qua independent label phenomenon. We think it’s totally cool that Arcade fire licenses its recordings to its CD producer, Merge Records. We’d also like to hear more of the sassy wit of Matador Records’ Gerard Cosloy.

Now that the outsized profits of the CD era have disappeared, the music business is rapidly retrenching. With a limited amount of money to make—a sum dwarfed by movies, video games, and sporting events—many bands may figure out that major labels’ publicity budgets are an unsustainable luxury.

The idea of the label as a tastemaker is not dead, though, regardless of size. The major labels will continue to feed hits to radio and, this October, Matador will celebrate its anniversary with an almost entirely sold-out three-day event in Las Vegas called “Matador at 21.” Cosloy wrote to me, “Record labels aren’t nearly as fucking smart as they think they are, otherwise they’d have found a way to have done away with these pesky artists. Conversely, who is actually thriving without the benefit of a trad record label?”

¶ In “I’m With the Brand,” Chris Lehman has a kind of hung-over fun with Paul Keegan’s advice for getting a job in today’s you-know-what. Chris has some sharp advice of his own — to employers. (The Awl)

Of course, the title “search-optimization expert” by itself is enough to make any chronically unemployed person despair that this economy will ever create a real job again. But all this dizzying comment-for-branding’s sake raises a larger question: Why would mastery of the time-killing canons of the blogging and social media worlds recommend anyone as a desirable worker in the first place? Why should a prospective employer assume that if you’re now furiously shoring up your reputation in blogland, then hieing over to Twitter and Facebook to boost your SEO quotient, you’d behave at all differently when he or she grants you a bit of scarce and valuable cubicle space? Transforming yourself into an online brand doesn’t mean you represent anything of real value, any more than commenting on a blog means you really have anything to say.

¶ To offset the foregoing levity (ha. ha.), read about the world’s longest garage sale. (Time; via  The Morning News)

Which leaves Johnston marching her daughters from yard to yard, as Brian follows behind in the family’s new Ford Expedition. “We’ve only spent $20 so far,” she says. “If I’d bought all these clothes in stores, I’d be out at least $250. We just can’t afford that anymore.” Johnston stands in the driveway of Stan Stevens, who tends his yard sale from the porch of a two-story house with new red siding. But the yard doesn’t belong to him. Until last year, Stevens owned the house next door. Then he was laid off from a factory that made gas tanks for minivans. His wife Michelle was laid off from her job as a hospice nurse. They lost the house to foreclosure and the minivan to repossession. Big crowds at the yard sale are the first good financial news that Stevens has received in months.

“This has been huge,” says Stevens, 46. “You can tell that with the economy people are shopping more at garage sales like this and less at stores.” In past years, many in Hudson say, buyers rarely haggled. This year, sellers were keeping their prices especially low, asking $2 or less for most items. Even so, shoppers were still looking for deals.

Great for aggregate demand, eh?

Tierce

¶ Move over, you opposable thumbs! You depend upon — or from, actually — an equally distinctive human characteristic: the shoulder. (NPR; via  3 Quarks Daily)

To understand the shoulder, look at a human skeleton. What you see is an intersection. The head of your arm bone (the humerus) meets your collar-bone (the clavicle) and part of the shoulder-blade (scapula). They’re held together with tendons and ligaments. The whole joint angles out horizontally from the neck, like a coat hanger.

“Because it’s pointing straight out,” says David Green, an anthropologist at George Washington University who studies the evolution of the shoulder, “our arms are allowed to just kind of hang freely, and then we can flex our arms at the elbow and have our hands out front, and that’s useful for manipulation. In apes, the joint actually points almost toward the ceiling.”

The ape shoulder is good for hanging from a tree, but when our ancestors started walking on two legs, the shoulder started to change. Early on, the joint descended lower on the chest. For a while, the shoulder-blade was more on the side, over the rib cage. Then it moved onto the back.

Sext

¶ In case you’re still thinking of branding yourself, notwithstanding Chris Lehman’s caustions, be sure to know what you’re doing when you have your profile picture taken. Christian Rudder crunches the responses to thousands of okcupid photographs. People with iPhones have more sex it seems, but they don’t look as good as — surprise! — SLR subjects. And: “The flash adds 7 years.”  (oktrends; via  The Awl)

Soft light can hide wrinkles, blemishes, devil eyes. The hard light of a flash often brings them out. As I illustrate with the dotted lines below, you can calculate the equivalent “aging” effects of a flash by counting years horizontally between the ‘flash’ and ‘no flash’ lines. For example, a 28 year-old who used a flash is as attractive as a 35 year-old who didn’t.

Nones

¶ Wouldn’t it be nice if all we had to worry about was China’s claim to the Spratly Islands? This diplomatic skirmish is so agreeably reminiscent of the run-up to World War I that we feel an almost Edwardian placidity. “The other” Geoff Dyer refreshes the screen on the South China Sea hypocrisis. (FT)

China has been happy to engage with the US on economic issues, joining the World Trade Organisation and stockpiling Treasury bonds, but Beijing has also accelerated a military build-up that has the US in its sights. Rather than preparing for a fight with the US, Chinese planners want gradually to squeeze the US out of its dominant position in Asian waters by developing a series of missile systems they describe as “anti-access” weapons.

Yet in the last year or so, China’s charm offensive in Asia has run into trouble – not least in the South China Sea, which for many Asian countries is a barometer of how a powerful China might treat them. The Paracel and Spratly islands are claimed in full or in part by Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Brunei. On China’s maps, however, the islands are inside a U-shaped line of its territorial waters, which stretches down to cover most of the South China Sea.

Amid rising tensions, China has reportedly told other Asian countries not to discuss the issue among themselves. According to US officials, Beijing also now says it considers the area a “core interest”, alongside Taiwan and Tibet. Some push-back was inevitable. Sure enough, Vietnam – the one country in the region with a Leninist political system comparable to China’s – lobbied its old nemesis in Washington to get involved. (The USS George Washington aircraft carrier visited Vietnam at the weekend.) Even Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who has spent much of the past decade praising Beijing, called last year on the US to remain the Pacific’s “superior power”.

Vespers

¶ Ron Rosenbaum writes with the greatest enthusiasm about a new edition of Pale Fire — just the poem. Illustrated by Jean Holabird, the boxed edition includes simulacra of the file cards on which John Shade wrote his 999 lines of iambic pentameter, and that Charles Kinbote stole from Shade’s widow. (If you haven’t read Pale Fire — as Vladimir Nabokov published it in 1962 — don’t try to make sense of this entry.) (Slate; via  3 Quarks Daily)

And then as I read and reread the novel, and sometimes just the poem, it began to dawn on me. Maybe the poem wasn’t meant as a pastiche, a parody, an homage to Robert Frost. John Shade refers to his reputation with characteristic modesty as being “one oozy footstep” behind Frost, but that doesn’t mean we should take his self-deprecation as gospel.) In fact, I must admit Frost has always left me cold, so to speak. And when I started asking myself what other American poet of the past century has done anything comparable in its offhand genius to “Pale Fire,” I could only think of Hart Crane, the Hart Crane of White Buildings.

Once it dawned on me that the poem might not be a carefully diminished version of Nabokov’s talents, but Nabokov writing at the peak of his powers in a unique throwback form (the kind of heroic couplets Alexander Pope used in the 18^th century), I began to write essays that advanced this revisionist view of the poem. It was actually one of these that came to the attention of Dmitri Nabokov who seemed to indicate this was his understanding as well: That his father intended the poem to be taken seriously.

It would have been nice of Mr Rosenbaum to tease out some of the beauties of Pale Fire the poem, but he’s much too excited about his new toy.

Compline

¶ Nicholas Carr digests the latest Nielsen numbers: depressingly, we’re watching more television (or “consuming media”) than ever — surely more than Nielsen’s 5.6 hours a day. (Rough Type; via  Marginal Revolution)

To give an honest accounting of the effects of the Net on media consumption, you need to add the amount of time that people spend consuming web media to the amount of time they already spend consuming TV and other traditional media. Once you do that, it becomes clear that the arrival of the web has not reduced the time people spend consuming media but increased it substantially. As consumption-oriented Internet devices, like the iPad, grow more popular, we will likely see an even greater growth in media consumption. The web, in other words, marks a continuation of a long-term cultural trend, not a reversal of it.

(Well, of course we’re not. We’re in our two-hours-per-week season. Rest of the time, it’s zero.)

Have a Look

¶ Nederlands dectective-mystery covers. (The Rumpus)

¶ Kari’s bar-fight face. (Feel better soon!)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 10:30 am.