Hedge Hogs

Robert Kuttner talks about the most visible and dangerous development in contemporary capitalism, the hedge fund, that unregulated engine of the rich to create outrageous personal wealth while endangering the economic lives of everyone else and, indeed, the entire financial system.

Beyond the risk of a crash, hedge funds and private equity operators are driving the wrong brand of capitalism. Theirs is a capitalism of windfall returns for financial engineers, and less security and income for workaday Americans. Hedge fund capitalism also signals that real entrepreneurship -- patiently nurturing a new idea and building a company of managers and employees -- is for suckers.

Même

FOODOLOGY

Q. What is your salad dressing of choice?
A. Olive oil and balsamic (or, rather, faux balsamic, since I was told that true Balsamic vinegar from Modena in Italy is aged over 100 years and costs about that)

Q. What is your favorite fast food restaurant?
A. Closed.

Q. What is your favorite sit-down restaurant?
A. I think about restaurants the way my dad used to think about food: it's all good, unless it's bad.

Q. On average, what size tip do you leave at a restaurant?
A. I shoot for 20%, but can't vouch for my math

Q. What food could you eat every day for two weeks and not get sick off of?
A. Give me each day my daily bread, just make it good

Q. What is your favorite type of gum?
A. Plaque-free

TECHNOLOGY

Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer?
A. Generic

Q. How many televisions are in your house?
A. Zip these days, and I don't miss it at all. Then again, the Sox will be playing the Yankees next weekend.

BIOLOGY

Q. What’s your best feature?
A. My gender.

Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
A. My hipness.

Q. Which of your five senses do you think is keenest?
A. Touch.

Q. When was the last time you had a cavity?
A. Where?

Q. What is the heaviest item you lifted last?
A. My responsiblities.

Q. Have you ever been knocked unconscious?
A. By the bottle.

BULLSHITOLOGY

Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
A. Absolutely not. Death's certainty yet unknowability is essential to the human condition.

Q. Is love for real?
A. Love is real, various, ubiquitous, rare, essential, God, all you need.... It's the human equivalent of the connection that makes a flock of doves change direction all in the same precise instant.

Q. If you could change your first name, what would you change it to?
A. Dunno

Q. What color do you think looks best on you?
A. Black and white.

Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item by mistake?
A. Only on purpose.

Q. Have you ever saved someone’s life?
A. Every time my daughters got near water before they could swim.

Q. Has someone ever saved yours?
A. When I was a twelve-year-old boy, I bounced a basketball from the sidewalk into a busy street and without thinking reached down to get it. This lady driving a red Pontiac slammed on her brakes, swerved to miss me, swerved back to avoid a head-on collision with cars coming the other way, saving my life, hers, and several others with some fancy-ass driving. Her car ended up broadside on the street and, like me, unscratched. My savior--pretty, dark hair, thirties--rolled down her window and said to me, "You asshole!"

DAREOLOGY

Q. Would you walk naked for a half mile down a public street for $100,000?
A. You wouldn't even need to bring clothes to my jail cell.

Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100?
A. Where?

Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000?
A. I have a feeling the originator of this même is a twelve year old boy.

Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000?
A. Would I still get to complete mêmes?

Q. Would you pose nude in a magazine for $250,000?
A. This one seems a bigger dilemma for women. We boys have no problems, except imagining getting paid for it.

Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1,000?
A. Is this a même for measuring masochism?

Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000?
A. Or sadism? It's an S/M même from the mind of a twelve-year old boy.

Q. Would you give up watching television for a year for $25,000?
A. For that kind of money, I could watch the Sox in a very posh pub.

Q. Give up MySpace forever for $30,000?
A. Do you mean, my space?

DUMBOLOGY

Q: What is in your left pocket?
A. The usual.

Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good movie?
A. I actually laughed.

Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house?
A. Yes.

Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower?
A. I've sat through a rain shower, a baby shower, and a wedding shower, but generally stand for a meteor shower.

Q: Could you live with roommates?
A. Could they live with me?

Q: How many pairs of flip-flops do you own?
A. No pairs, only flip-flop, flip-flop

Q: Last time you had a run-in with the cops?
A. I have more of a drive-in history with cops.

Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?
A. Young again. A twelve year old boy.

LASTOLOGY

Q: Friend you talked to?
A. My best friend, Robin.

Q: Last person you called?
A. My older daughter.

RANDOMOLOGY

Q: First place you went this morning?
A. To pee.

Q: What can you not wait to do?
A. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.

Q: What’s the last movie you saw?
A. Volver, perhaps as good as a movie can get when it has no remotely likeable male characters.

Q: Are you a friendly person?
A. I did this même, didn't I?

Warner Warning

Walking by Ty Warner's various sea-front properties in Montecito last week, I witnessed an army of laborers building, renovating, beautifying. An economic apologist might piously point out how many jobs "Ty" is creating, how much money he's pumping into the local economy (though I wonder how much of the reported hundreds of million actually stays in the local economy and how much goes to imported luxuary items and materials). But to me, the significant fact is that so much capital and so much human labor, skilled and unskilled, lower class and lower middle class, is being devoted to the exclusive benefit of rich people.

Consider the Warner properties, not including his multi-lot bluff-top estate, and not including the cost of actual purchase:

• Biltmore Hotel, recently renovated for a cool $240 million (for 233 rooms). Rooms "start at $550" a night.
  
• San Ysidro Ranch, recently renovated for $130 million (for 40 cottages and suites), plus an additional $25 million for the Stonehouse restaurant. Accommodations available for $800-$4,000 a night.
• Coral Casino, currently undergoing a $35 million renovation. Membership cost unavailable on the Internet.
  
• Montecito Country Club, renovation plans in the works, with Jack Nicklaus designing the golf course. Membership, $10,000.
• Sandpiper Golf Course, $124-$144 for a round of golf.
• Rancho San Marcos, currently a relative upper-middle-class bargain at $65-$85 for a round of golf, though changes are expected.

Apologists might point to the $1.5 million he donated to the Sea Center on Stearns Wharf or the $40,000 to renovate the path in front of his bluff-top estate. Please! He invests hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps as much as a billion dollars, in properties that benefit exclusively rich people and gives two local donations worth a fraction of 1% of his other local investments, just barely enough to get his highly visible name on a highly visible public building, plus, of course, the aesthetic satisfaction of beatifying the view from his estate (even changing the color of the Sea Center).

Ty Warner epitomizes the worst of contemporary capitalism. He makes a fortune selling frivolous beanie babies to kids and crazed collectors, then invests that fortune in luxurious playpens for the rich and super-rich. His idea of public spirit, his contribution to making the world a better place, begins with personal aesthetics and ends with public relations. The saddest part is that he is typical, more successful than the run-of-the-mill millionaire, but still playing the same game of individual aggrandizement with little or no sense of larger purpose.

Digital Death

Writing about art and immortality in his book, Ancient Mesopotamia, Stephen Bertman writes:

We labor under an illusion if we assume our present age will be better remembered than antiquity. The average life expectancy of magnetic tapes, audio or video, is only 10 years; of optical disks, 5o; of archival quality microfilm, but a 100. In fact, average-quality CD-ROMs become unreadable or unreliable after only five years. Advances in technology, moreover, make older computer hardware and software obsolete; and as they grow obsolete, their data becomes unintelligible. Meanwhile, the film that recorded the images of the past is already crumbling; according to UNESCO, "three-quarters of the films which were made worldwide before 1950 have already disappeared." Thus our so-called Age of Information may be known to the future as an age of missing information.

Building Mortality

The great thing about construction projects, especially renovation projects, is that they strongly suggest mortality.

I've been rebuilding a bathroom over the last couple of weeks. Carpentry, plastering, tiling, painting, minor plumbing, and more than I 've wanted of industrial strength cleaning. I've scratched knuckles, raised blisters, plastered my hair, sanded joint compound dust into every crevice of myself and the place, lost the ability to smell paint, and felt the sting of industrial solvents in my nightmares.

And I've loved it. The bathroom looks great. I couldn't be prouder of myself, my skill, my capacity to improve the world. I want to show off my accomplishments to all family, friends, landlords, and anyone else willing to admire my work.

Yet renovation, by its very nature, is also humbling. With every hammer swing and brush stroke, I know that I am replacing the fruits of someone else's proud labor. Thus I know--even as I aspire for my work to last, to be a monument to my skill and labor and accomplishment--that my excellent work will fade, crumble, disappear.

Indeed, I'm inspired--in my tiny tiny way--by the great builders in history, most especially the Great Pyramid of Giza, the oldest by far of any of the ancient Wonders of the Mediterranean World and the only one surviving. Built by untold thousands of slaves over a period of twenty years, the pyramid must represent some astronomical percentage of Pharonic Egypt's GNP. I also wonder how many slaves died in its construction. Nevertheless, it is remarkable. Built with the most amazing mathematical and engineering skill, after 45 centuries it still less shows than 0.1% error in symmetrical dimensions, and the interior blocks of stone weighing several tons each are so perfectly placed that a playing card will still not fit between any two stones.

Yet even the Great Pyramid, the oldest and best monument to immortality in the history of the planet, is in fact a testament to mortality. Today it stands in defiance of time, but still shows the effects of time: it has lost its smooth stone exterior; ten feet of its tip has eroded away; its original purpose as a monument/tomb/symbol of religious and political power probably lasted centuries, perhaps millennia, but the place was thoroughly looted by the time Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in the 4th century BC. Like the tortoise that lives for centuries compared to the insect that lives for hours, the pyramid has a much longer life span than any other building, but still a mortal lifespan.

Tones of tragedy thus accompany the doomed effort to create something that endures. Yet, if we accept this fact of life from the outset, then building something to last offers a challenge, plus the fun and satisfaction of meeting that challenge with all the skills we can muster, all our energy to do our best with the meagre tools and talents we have, to at least improve over what was there before, to create a better world. Embracing the tragedy of unavaoidable failure yet doing our best to refute it is the joy of mortality.

"Into Great Silence"

Some part of my Irish Catholic soul must be attracted to the priesthood. Not that I'm religious, or a believer, or even particularly moral, God knows (if He exists). Still, I'm attracted by the practice of contemplating God, or rather its secular equivalent. If I can translate God from religion to secular philosophy according to the tenet that God is life, then contemplating God means contemplating life.

This attraction is probably the result of some foreign influence, since it is so un-American, against the cultural compulsion to DO: achieve, build, earn, consume. Or perhaps it's just a sickness, a brooding nature, an affinity for cloud nine (as my father used to tell me), in other words, a poor excuse for not DOING. Although, I must say, I DO plenty of building, achieving, consuming, never enough of course (especially earning), but plenty. Nevertheless, I'm better, happier, when I contemplate the purpose and meaning of being alive. I indulge those moments outside of everyday experience that nonetheless define everyday experience. Perhaps it's akin to a pursuit of grace.

No doubt this pursuit attracted me the other night to the west coast premier of Into Great Silence, a German film by Philip Grönig about a monastery in the French Alps famous for its monks' vow of silence. From the website:

Silence. Repetition. Rhythm. The film is an austere, next to silent meditation on monastic life in a very pure form. No music except the chants in the monastery, no interviews, no commentaries, no extra material.

Changing of time, seasons, and the ever repeated elements of the day, of the prayer. A film to become a monastery, rather than depict one. A film about awareness, absolute presence, and the life of men who devoted their lifetimes to god in the purest form. Contemplation. An object in time.

As advertised, the film, like life in the monastery, is remarkably spare, silent, almost completely uneventful: no musical score, virtually no dialogue; no plot, no drama, no climax. Indeed, in a three hour film, almost nothing happens. The film is one prolonged--two minutes or more--artsy camera shot after another, of the beautiful monastery and its alpine setting; of monks praying, ringing the bells to signal praying, or doing some simple daily chore like cutting celery; of monks passing each other in silence. The only structure is this cycle of daily life, repeated again and again, through the seasons, throughout the monk's life, from initiate to blind old age, minimizing doing and maximizing contemplation of God's meaning. Nothing changes or develops other than this unhurried, repetitive, distraction-less approach to God.

Not exactly a formula for a Hollywood blockbuster.

Yet the audience was maybe 500 in the college lecture hall and still well over 400 after three hours, most of us still awake, though quiet, subdued, perhaps transported, as was the film's intent, into the experience of the monastery, monastic life, contemplation. The three hours were not spellbinding. My attention wandered, settling at times on my "to do" consciousness, my plans for after the movie, my appetites. Still, I cycled back inexorably to the film and its silent, unhurried, inexorable pursuit of grace. By the end, I felt that this pursuit was also mine. The tiniest part of that grace mine.

I am certainly not apt to contemplate Christ as the path to God's grace, but rather to pursue grace by contemplating my own acts of doing and how they contribute or not to my purpose, meaning, and happiness in this pathless existence. Or perhaps I'll contemplate the meaning of the acts of human beings, today or in history. Maybe I'll contemplate a film or other work of art. Above all, I'll contemplate the people close to me, especially the uncanny, sometimes overwhelming presence of a loved one. I also struggle, forget, screw up, get lost in my projects and appetites and distractions. I'm no monk. When I return to the contemplation of life, however, I take to it as naturally as a monk to prayer.

Paradise Blues

When I first moved to Santa Barbara, I was struck by how pretty everything looks all the time, which left me feeling like I had moved into a dream. It's a very pretty dream, but maybe, at least at first, at least for my east coast blue collar blood, maybe a little too pretty, too dreamy. The line from "Orange Juice Blues" kept haunting me: "I'm tired of everything being beautiful, beautiful." So I went on a mission to find grit in Santa Barbara.

I couldn't find any, at least not Anglo grit. I found sleaze, both working class and upper crust, but that ain't no authentic, dare to do the right thing, unconcerned by dirty finger nails, do the hard work of the world, grit. The closest thing I could find was stylized designer grit, created from the clean pretty drafting tables of clean pretty minds, whose rebellion from stucco walls and red-tile roofs created coffee shops, bars, or restaurants where graduate students and ex-graduate students like me could drink three-dollar coffees or four-dollar beers and feel the authenticity of bared brick and ductwork, pre-distressed furniture, and the atmosphere of antique Coke bottles and old license plates. Had I moved to a new state or a new state of being?

After a year or two in town, a bit slowly, really, I discovered the venerable concert series, Sings Like Hell. Producer Peggy Jones and her hellions have succeeded in introducing grit into the dreamy prettiness of Santa Barbara far better than most, certainly far better than I. Within the beautiful, beautiful Lobero opera house, they stage some of the best musical acts in town, specializing in the graduates of--and those still enrolled in--the school of non-commercial knocks. Heavily flavored by the Austin scene, Sings Like Hell offers singer-songwiters who are more familiar with loud bars a chance to perform for a sit-down audience in an acoustically designed venue. The tag line of the series is "The best music you've never heard," and indeed the best shows not starring Richard Thompson are the ones by unknown surprises. Anyone familiar with Sings Like Hell knows all this.

Last month, for example, Brett Dennen, unknown to me and everyone I know, debuted at Sings Like Hell as the headline act, even though he had been billed as the warm-up. Tall, baby-faced, vaguely androgynous, with a big mop of red hair, he came on stage, plugged in an acoustic guitar with a big peace sticker on it, and made himself comfortable by kicking off his flip-flops and propelling himself around stage with his toes. A distinct "what in hell" buzz went through the crowd. Then the music started, energetic, subtely sophisticated, smartly arranged. Then he started to sing, distinctive voice, raspy and melodic, pouring out passion and remarkably mature for a 26 year old lyrics about struggling for love and peace and meaning in our consumer culture. Singing like Hell in the Lobero. Grit in paradise. We loved it.